No abstract

If they had tuned in to radio station  on July 12, 1934, residents of Washington, D.C., could have heard a talk by Vernon Bailey, the recently retired chief field naturalist of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. Bailey was best known for his involvement in controversies over wolf eradication in the West, but his radio talk that day was on a subject closer to home and less politically charged, at least on the surface: "Animals Worth Knowing around the Capitol." While he touched on a number of Washington-area animals that were "worth knowing," he singled out one type for special attention: gray squirrels, which he described as "probably our best-known and most loved native wild animals, as they are not very wild and, being very intelligent, accept and appreciate our hospitality and friendship." 1 Compared to most of his listeners, Bailey was unusually well informed about the biology and ecology of urban squirrels, which he had been feeding in the backyard of his townhouse in the Kalorama Triangle neighborhood for decades. Even so, his interest in the species and his belief in its virtues would probably not have surprised many of his fellow Washingtonians. By the early twentieth century, eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), once limited to rural areas, had become the most visible nondomesticated mammals in American cities. Like Bailey, numerous naturalists, zoo directors, educators, park designers, and poets had attempted to convince the public of gray squirrels' contribution to the urban landscape and their value as members of the urban community. The arboreal rodents were protected, sheltered, and fed by the humans who treated them as public pets, even as they aroused the resentment and distaste of those who viewed them as pests. 2

No abstract

No abstract

Argos is a satellite-based data collection and location system that has been in operation since the late 1970s; it is the only such system to be dedicated solely to environmental applications. This paper shows how multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of envisioning and studying the global environment have been embodied in the Argos system. In particular, it shows how the system’s initial focus on meeting the needs of meteorologists and oceanographers made it difficult for wildlife biologists, who were interested in tracking the long-distance movements of animals, to use Argos tags. Physical environmental scientists’ vision of the global environment as a ‘volume of flows’ dictated their need for regular, precise, standardized sampling stations distributed in a grid across and above the Earth’s surface. Biologists interested in the interactions of individual animals and populations in a ‘web of life’, in contrast, demanded a flexible system of global access to the movements of individual bodies. Until the mid-1980s, the unit of the French space agency responsible for Argos resisted changes to the system that would have made it easier for biologists to deploy lightweight, low-reliability tags. It was only after the quasi-commercialization of the system in 1986 that it began to make significant concessions to the needs of biologists. The history of Argos suggests that individual infrastructures of environmental observation can host multiple and conflicting global environmental visions and that commercialization, at least within certain constraints, has provided opportunities for such visions to proliferate.

Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyaways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues that the success of the bird-banding program depended on a fragile balance between the centripetal effects of national coordination and the centrifugal effects of volunteer enthusiasm. For various reasons, efforts to maintain this balance were largely abandoned by the Bird-Banding Office from the late 1930s onward. Nevertheless, the first two decades of the national bird-banding effort provide an example of how a "citizen-science" project that generates "Big Data" can produce significant scientific results without subordinating the enthusiasms of volunteers to the data-collecting needs of professional scientists.

No abstract

No abstract