North Coast Diaries

Forward into the past

I got an email the other day from my good friends at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center alerting me to a new data recovery effort called North American Bird Phenology Program. I spent the weekend transcribing scanned copies of hand-written phenology data cards into the online database. I don’t know how many cards I transcribed. It’s kind of addictive, like computer solitaire. I’d tell myself it was time to stop, but kept on doing “just one more”.

The card collection program began in the early 1880’s by Wells W. Cooke who developed an interest in the timing of migration (phenology) while teaching on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The program first focused on the Mississippi flyway and eventually, through the auspices of C. Hart Merriam of the American Ornithologist’s Union (AOU), was expanded to include the entire United States, Canada and a portion of the West Indies. By the time the program was discontinued in the 1970’s, there were some 6-million data cards, all housed in a card-file in a corner of the USGS offices in Patuxent with no practical way to access them.

The main problem is that they are all hand-written and in formats that changed over the years. They defy a clean scanning solution. So the folks at USGS are photo-scanning each card and asking volunteers on the internet to transcribe the data on the cards into an online data-form.

Many of the cards have only the AOU number and a line of dates. Some are on official cards for the program and some are field reports copied out of field notebooks. Some of the names I recognize, like Finley, Bailey, and Taverner, but most are local volunteers who dutifully collected data and sent it in.

This was an amazing early effort in Citizen Science that, as is true of so many data collection efforts, never went beyond the collection phase. As you can well imagine, 6-million data cards is quite unwieldy for any data processor and most of these cards were collected before electronic data storage was even invented. So, now it will take a team of volunteer Citizen Scientists to act as data transcribers to rescue the data collected by their forbearers and get it into some sort of usable form.

Imagine the potential power 120 years of migration data could have in analyzing trends over time: population change trends, climate change trends, landscape change trends. This is a veritable gold mine of information, once mislaid and now re-discovered.

And it makes one wonder how many other data-piles are languishing away in dusty archives around the country.

Posted by mbalame at February 23, 2009 12:10 PM