Re: [ECOLOG-L] Interesting column in Nature about rescuing old data

[Brian Buma]

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unpublished data from his and his student's archives, to look at 100 years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
bb...@alaska.edu

www.brianbuma.com

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 11:57 AM, David Inouye  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
> ino...@umd.edu
>
> Principal Investigator
> Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory
> PO Box 519
> Crested Butte, CO 81224
>

[ECOLOG-L] Interesting column in Nature about rescuing old data

[David Inouye]

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
ino...@umd.edu

Principal Investigator
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory
PO Box 519
Crested Butte, CO 81224