This is a great post, and timely. The author notes a lack of success stories: An example on the ecology side (sorry for the self-promotion, but this is what I've been thinking about lately) is a paper is coming out in Ecology next month using William S. Cooper's original 1916-1935 data, plus unpublished data from his and his student's archives, to look at 100 years of change. It's the longest running permanent plot network focused on primary succession (and perhaps all successional type work) and only possible because of old data that was carefully preserved by archivists (there will be further publications from it as well). As it stands, with quite a bit of intensive fieldwork, we were able to rediscover the plots and make sure that future generations can actually find them again. It provides a truly unique perspective on landscape change that simply can't be achieved via chronosequences or other inferential approaches.
There's immense opportunity to create long-term datasets by revisiting and documenting old study sites, and it needs to be done soon, as it's often much harder to find old field sites (e.g., pre-GPS) than one would think. I'd guess that the sites would have been undiscoverable had nobody attempted to find them for another few decades, as the century old markers were well buried and the aboveground bits quite precarious. So urgency is warranted. And it makes for a good outreach story as well. The Ecology article will be in the June issue, should be online any day now. Recent writeup of the story: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/glacier-bay-plant-succession-study-william-skinner-cooper-buma/ Some pictures of the old data from an older blog entry: http://www.brianbuma.com/news/2016/5/6/the-100-year-old-plots-william-cooper-and-don-lawrence-archives --------------------------- Brian Buma, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Forest Ecology University of Alaska Ph: 907-796-6410 [email protected] www.brianbuma.com On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 11:57 AM, David Inouye <[email protected]> wrote: > https://www.nature.com/news/rescue-old-data-before-it-s-too-late-1.21993 > > -- > Dr. David W. Inouye > Professor Emeritus > Department of Biology > University of Maryland > College Park, MD 20742-4415 > [email protected] > > Principal Investigator > Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory > PO Box 519 > Crested Butte, CO 81224 >
