YA summer '01 - Yosemite Online

Joseph Grinnell's field notes from June, 1918.
an offer in 1908 to create the Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology at UC Berkeley. He directed it until his death in
1939, realizing his dream and influencing generations of
biologists in the areas of ecology, vertebrate systematics,
and evolutionary biology.
“What’s astonishing about Grinnell’swork—and the
only reason we can do this resurvey now—is the extent to
which he kept highly detailed records. His field notes are
extraordinary,” said Moritz, an evolutionary biologist
who specializes in lizards of the Australian rain forests.
“He set up a whole system of taking field notes that’s
been perpetuated through the history of the museum and
has spread out to other places as well. What makes this
museum special is that we have so much data per specimen,
and it’s so well organized. That’s Grinnell’slegacy.”
The National Science Foundation just awarded the
museum a grant to put all the field notes of Grinnell and
his colleagues on the Web in a searchable database. The
notes themselves comprise 13,000 pages, and are accompanied
by 2,000 photos and tens of thousands of specimens
in the museum’s collections.
Among Grinnell’s legacies was the first field survey of
Yosemite National Park conducted at a time when the
park’s unique and fragile habitat was feeling the pressure
of increasing tourism. His survey led to recommendations
for managing and preserving the park, among
them, elimination of agriculture and removal of a small
zoo from the valley.
Yosemite’s Thompson said he keeps a copy of
Grinnell’s published study near his desk and refers to it
frequently.
“Grinnell had a very prominent place in the development
of science in the park service,” he said. He expects
to make full use of the current survey.
The Yosemite field notes once generated by Grinnell,
Storer, and their team alone number 2,000 pages, and the
combined team put in about 1,000 hours of field work in
the park.
“We’re going back through the field notes containing
all the original information to do an exact comparison
between today and eighty years ago, which is a remarkable
thing,” said James Patton, who has been leading this
summer’s survey teams. Patton is a curator in the
museum, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of integrative
biology and an expert on small mammals.
To make these comparisons, the team is revisiting initially
about ten of the twenty-two sites surveyed by
Grinnell and Storer within the boundaries of Yosemite.
Assuming funding comes through, museum scientists
will revisit the remainder of the twenty-two “Grinnell”
sites in the park, plus add some new ones in the northern
tier, an area of the park Grinnell did not visit.
“Soon after I arrived at the museum (in 2000), I sat
down and read a paper Grinnell wrote in 1910 on the
uses of a research museum in which he laid out really,
really clearly the purpose of building a museum the
way he did,” Moritz said. “He actually specified that
his hope was that future curators and zoologists could
come back in 100 years and look at the effect of human
changes to the landscapes on the vertebrate fauna. As
soon as I read that, it was really clear what we had to do
for our centenary —do what Grinnell told us to do and
resurvey his transects.”
While the earlier biologists used shotguns, leg-hold
traps, and snap traps to do much of their surveying and
Joseph Dixon, a student of Grinnell's, working in the field. Dixon
later did extensive research work in the national parks.
4 YOSEMITE ASSOCIATION, FALL 2003