“No good field work can be reliable without a written record, set down in the field. No record kept in the head can be as accurate or precise as one in writing.”
— Steven G. Herman, in The Naturalist’s Field Journal

“A notebook is the single most important piece of equipment a naturalist takes into the field. It is useful for recording daily observations, sketching plants and animals for later reference, taking notes on behavior and habitat, and assisting in identification by recording field marks that otherwise might be forgotten. The naturalist’s notebook only increases in value as time goes by and observations accumulate. Soon, patterns begin to emerge from what initially may have been chance encounters with various plants or animals. A well-kept notebook that preserves a record of their activities at a particular place over an extended period of time can contribute information valuable to our understanding of nature.”
— Stephen Whitney 

 

I was recently asked by one of the community scientists working with me, whether iNaturalist and the various other digital applications available to record field observations will replace field notebooks.

My answer was, “Perhaps, but that is not necessarily a good thing." 

For those of you who have joined me in conducting field research or any foray into nature, I dare say that I would be unrecognizable without my bright orange field notebook in hand or poking out of the thigh pocket in my field pants. For naturalists, a field notebook has been an essential, constant companion and tool for documenting their observations. The question is, are they still relevant today?

The use of notebooks by scientists and naturalists to record observations, ideas, and the kernels of future hypotheses has a history extending back many centuries. Initially referred to as “commonplace books," they were required by the tutors (faculty) at Cambridge University in England as early as the 1600s. Charles Darwin, a graduate of Cambridge, kept extensive, detailed notebooks on his voyage around the world. An edited version of those notes then became his first book, “The Voyage of the Beagle." Upon returning to England, he opened a series of notebooks that would eventually become the nucleus of his “Origin of the Species." Scholars continue to comb through all his notebooks in search of new insights as to when and how he developed his important theory.

 

Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847, then wrote “Walden; or, Life in the Woods." As important as that book is as a fixture of early American literature, arguably of equal importance was his field notebook where he documented the emergence and flowering dates for every plant he encountered. That notebook has become an invaluable resource for understanding the impacts of climate change and invasive species in the northeastern U.S. Those findings were recently (2014) published: “Walden Warming” by Richard Primack.

A bit later, in the early 1900s, Joseph Grinnell became the first director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. One of his early efforts was to document the distributions of the vertebrates (birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians) of California, and to create a baseline from which to measure changes in those distributions over time. In accomplishing that task, he developed a rigorous structure for field notebooks. They only used loose leafed three-ring binders, and then within them created two major sections. One section was devoted to place descriptions: where were the observations taken, what were the roads and towns nearby, what was the weather, the season, the date, and a list of the species seen. The second section was devoted to species accounts: for each species listed in the place description there would be an as detailed as possible description of how each species was detected, what were the field characteristics, what was it doing, how many were there, and what were the habitat features that species was using?  For each new observation of a species, and for each new place that species was seen, new pages were inserted into the binder, so there would be a section for ladder backed woodpeckers, and another section for chuckwallas, and so on. With more observations each section would get thicker and thicker. All notebook accounts were to be written in waterproof ink. I do not know if it is still occurring, but since Grinnell’s day through at least the end of the 20^th century, every UC Berkeley student in zoology was taught Grinnell’s field book structure, and they were expected to use it on all their field trips. 

As those Berkeley students became professors at other universities, the Grinnell notebook method came with them and has been taught again and again. I was taught how to record field notes as a student at UC Davis in the 1970s. I confess that ultimately, I found that structure a bit too rigorous, and so I have shifted to using permanently bound (not loose leafed three-ring binders) waterproof notebooks and use satellite coordinates rather that detailed descriptions of where I was and how I got there. I also use a pencil. It takes me about 12 months to fill each notebook. It is not so critical that one uses the “Grinnell method," but arguably, whatever format you use, it is important that you keep a notebook. As any trial lawyer will attest, eyewitness accounts get less reliable with time. I am regularly going back to my notebooks to refresh my memory, and mine those data for constructing and supporting (or refuting) hypotheses as to how species are responding to the changes we humans are perpetrating. It is not hard to imagine how valuable Grinnell’s original notebooks have been in understanding the effects of the changes that have occurred across the California landscapes. In the early 2000s teams of naturalist scientists retraced Grinnell’s efforts across California, going back to the exact places described in this notebooks a century before and, using the same methods, documented changes that have occurred. 

So, does iNaturalist, along other internet applications, now replace the need for field notebooks? Without question, iNaturalist has been a huge catalyst for getting people outside and contributing critical location data to larger databases. I use it regularly.  In a recent paper that I and my collaborators published, we compared historical (1960s) lizard records from Joshua Tree National Park to those same species’ current distributions, largely based on recent iNaturalist records.  The lizards are incrementally shifting up in elevation. But iNaturalist records are largely restricted to what you can take a picture of. Great for plants and sun-bathing lizards, but iNaturalist records for fast moving, furtive animals certainly do not reflect their true abundance.  Then, there is a greater tendency to document new (to the observer) or rare species, than to contribute common species, especially not at a level that would indicate their real abundance.

 

One lesson I have learned is that common species should not be discounted as unimportant in understanding the impacts of environmental change. We all get understandably excited when we find a rare species, but whether that rare species is present or not could be due to something intrinsic about the species – they are rare for a reason which may or may not be due to the effect a naturalist is trying to evaluate. Conversely, a change in abundance of a common species, even if it is only a 10 to 20-percent decline, can be statistically validated, and then tested to see if it can be attributed to some perturbation, especially if that perturbation is spatially discrete – meaning if you can show that the common species’ decline is restricted only to the area where the perturbation occurs. That could be along the edge of a newly created housing development, in juxtaposition with some invasive species, in a place where wildfires are more common than an adjacent area, or at lower elevations or south facing slopes where climate change is increasing aridity faster than at higher elevations or north facing slopes. Keeping species records, including common species, in a field notebook provides a foundation for developing hypotheses as to those “why” questions. Why is species “A” more common here than there? When those notebook entries also include information about associated species, or fire history, or invasive weeds, strong hypotheses become much easier to construct. Constructing hypotheses, whether ultimately validated or rejected, encourages and develops critical thinking skills, something that is sometimes in short supply. Field notebooks also offer a species for a naturalist to muse about their experiences in nature, to sketch pictures of some feature that would otherwise be difficult to capture with a mobile phone camera.  

So, is technology replacing field notebooks? I hope not. 

Nullius in verba

Go outside, tip your hat to a lizard (and a cactus), and be safe.