When Lewis and Clark explored the American West from 1804 to 1806, they documented the lands, flora, fauna, and peoples that they encountered. At midcentury, Darwin and Wallace each kept extensive written documentation of their field observations. While Darwin’s work is still being studied today, Wallace’s notes were lost to a ship’s fire, sinking to the Atlantic floor. Field notebooks have been an integral part of natural history exploration and contain gold mines of information about areas that have changed substantially since European settlement. Explorers recorded information about geology, weather, human inhabitants, plants, and animals, as well as population densities and interactions between the various elements. However, these fragile books are filled with difficult to decipher scrawls in fading pencil or on crumbling paper, and are stored in archives and museums.
Results/Conclusions
The Smithsonian Institution and Biodiversity Heritage Library have established the Field Notebook Project where these fragile documents at the Smithsonian are conserved and then scanned as images. The notebook pages are then placed on a website where they are transcribed by a global cadre of volunteers who also research technical terms, and then the notebooks are made available for research through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The notebooks can then be used to establish ecological baseline information about regions that have changed substantially due to human influence. The information is invaluable for restoration of such sites as Gray Ranch, part of the Nature Conservancy’s Diamond A Ranch in New Mexico. The Field Notebook site can also be used to learn what types of information an ecologist can glean from a typical scientific notebook, and provides a model for other archives and museums to make their historical scientific data more usable.