Biological Field Stations of the World
Author: Homer Alexander Jack
Publisher:
Published: 1945
Total Pages: 94
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
Enhancing the Value and Sustainability of Field Stations and Marine Laboratories in the 21st Century
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2014-09-11
Total Pages: 167
ISBN-13: 0309305373
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor over a century, field stations have been important entryways for scientists to study and make important discoveries about the natural world. They are centers of research, conservation, education, and public outreach, often embedded in natural environments that range from remote to densely populated urban locations. Because they lack traditional university departmental boundaries, researchers at field stations have the opportunity to converge their science disciplines in ways that can change careers and entire fields of inquiry. Field stations provide physical space for immersive research, hands-on learning, and new collaborations that are otherwise hard to achieve in the everyday bustle of research and teaching lives on campus. But the separation from university campuses that allows creativity to flourish also creates challenges. Sometimes, field stations are viewed as remote outposts and are overlooked because they tend to be away from population centers and their home institutions. This view is exacerbated by the lack of empirical evidence that can be used to demonstrate their value to science and society. Enhancing the Value and Sustainability of Field Stations and Marine Laboratories in the 21st Century summarizes field stations' value to science, education, and outreach and evaluates their contributions to research, innovation, and education. This report suggests strategies to meet future research, education, outreach, infrastructure, funding, and logistical needs of field stations. Today's technologies - such as streaming data, remote sensing, robot-driven monitoring, automated DNA sequencing, and nanoparticle environmental sensors - provide means for field stations to retain their special connection to nature and still interact with the rest of the world in ways that can fuel breakthroughs in the environmental, physical, natural, and social sciences. The intellectual and natural capital of today's field stations present a solid platform, but many need enhancements of infrastructure and dynamic leadership if they are to meet the challenges of the complex problems facing the world. This report focuses on the capability of field stations to address societal needs today and in the future.
Biological Field Stations of the World
Author: Homer Alexander Jack
Publisher:
Published: 1945
Total Pages: 73
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLandscapes and Labscapes
Author: Robert E. Kohler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-11-15
Total Pages: 343
ISBN-13: 0226450112
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls? In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Field Life
Author: Jeremy Vetter
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2016-11-01
Total Pages: 464
ISBN-13: 0822981459
DOWNLOAD EBOOKField Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded. Four distinct modes of field practice, which were shared by different field science disciplines, proliferated during this period—surveys, lay networks, quarries, and stations—and this book explores the dynamics that underpinned each of them. Using two diverse case studies to animate each mode of practice, as well as the making of the field as a place for science, Field Life combines textured analysis of specific examples of field science on the ground with wider discussion of the commonalities in the practices of a diverse array of field sciences, including the earth and physical sciences, the life and agricultural sciences, and the human sciences. By situating science in its regional environmental context, Field Life analyzes the intersection between the cosmopolitan knowledge of science and the experiential knowledge of people living in the field. Examples of field science in the Plains and Rockies range widely: geological surveys and weather observing networks, quarries to uncover dinosaur fossils and archaeological remains, and branch agricultural experiment stations and mountain biological field stations.
Knowing Global Environments
Author: Jeremy Vetter
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 0813548756
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKnowing Global Environments brings together nine leading scholars whose work spans a variety of environmental and field sciences, including archaeology, agriculture, botany, climatology, ecology, evolutionary biology, oceanography, ornithology, and tidology. Collectively their essays explore the history of the field sciences, through the lens of place, practice, and the production of scientific knowledge, with a wide-ranging perspective extending outwards from the local to regional, national, imperial, and global scales. The book also shows what the history of the field sciences can contribute to environmental history-especially how knowledge in the field sciences has intersected with changing environments-and addresses key present-day problems related to sustainability, such as global climate, biodiversity, oceans, and more. Contributors to Knowing Global Environments reveal how the field sciences have interacted with practical economic activities, such as forestry, agriculture, and tourism, as well as how the public has been involved in the field sciences, as field assistants, students, and local collaborators.
A Century of Maritime Science
Author: Jennifer Hubbard
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2016-01-01
Total Pages: 486
ISBN-13: 1442648589
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Century of Maritime Science reviews the fisheries, environmental, oceanographic, and aquaculture research conducted over the last hundred years at St. Andrews from the perspective of the participating scientists.
Stations in the Field
Author: Raf De Bont
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-03-26
Total Pages: 283
ISBN-13: 022614190X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen we think of sites of animal research that symbolize modernity, the first places that come to mind are grand research institutes in cities and near universities that house the latest in equipment and technologies, not the surroundings of the bird’s nest, the octopus’s garden in the sea, or the parts of inland lakes in which freshwater plankton reside. Yet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of zoologists began establishing novel, indeed modern ways of studying nature, propagating what present-day ecologists describe as place-based research. Raf De Bont’s Stations in the Field focuses on the early history of biological field stations and the role these played in the rise of zoological place-based research. Beginning in the 1870s, a growing number of biological field stations were founded—first in Europe and later elsewhere around the world—and thousands of zoologists received their training and performed their research at these sites. Through case studies, De Bont examines the material and social context in which field stations arose, the actual research that was produced in these places, the scientific claims that were developed there, and the rhetorical strategies that were deployed to convince others that these claims made sense. From the life of parasitic invertebrates in northern France and freshwater plankton in Schleswig-Holstein, to migratory birds in East Prussia and pest insects in Belgium, De Bont’s book is fascinating tour through the history of studying nature in nature.
Bulletin
Author: United States. Office of Education
Publisher:
Published: 1941
Total Pages: 790
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican Tropics
Author: Megan Raby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-10-03
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 1469635615
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBiodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.
