The world is becoming increasingly altered in ways that drastically affect habitat quality for wildlife (Seto et al. 2012). Moreover, the majority of people now live in urban and suburban areas (United Nations Population Fund 2007), so this is where primary...
The future requires that natural history instructors develop innovative approaches to pedagogy or risk losing an audience that has grown up peering into screens and manipulating game consoles. Pedagogical innovation becomes even more vital, as classroom instruction...
Natural history is a “practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy” (Fleischner 2002). Some interpret this as an ability to identify to species every wildflower in a field or to keep a...
Field-based teaching has long been an essential component of natural history education, providing students with spatial, temporal, and sensory context for the study of natural history. The field journal, or nature journal, is used by many natural history educators to...
Persistent questions regarding the identities of organisms and their relationships to environments have driven natural history through the millennia. Tools to investigate and record findings have changed, with recent innovations in genetic, tracking, and visualization...
Natural history is who we are as ecologists. I understand such a general statement is not quite this simple, but as natural history informs our purpose and identity, it is a big part of the story. Natural history shaped many of our individual identities as ecologists...
One reason why natural history is so important now is that we do not know what questions we will need to ask in the future. Natural history collections and field notes can be extraordinary storehouses of information if we curate them well and handle them with the care...
There have never been people without natural history – the practice of natural history attentiveness is the oldest continuous human tradition. Throughout human history and pre-history, attentiveness to nature was so fully entwined with daily life and survival that it...
In spring of 2017, two of us (HB and FC) met on a weekend-long class in the Eastern Sierra Nevada taught by Richard Nevle. The class combined an exploration of regional geology, ecology, and environmental history with guided drawing exercises and field journaling....
Eleven years ago, we wrote with both excitement and determination about the need for a “natural history renaissance” (Trombulak and Fleischner 2007). The determination came from the recognition that natural history as a practice and a way of engaging with the more...
Eager to study natural history, adult students have gathered at an Audubon Camp on the Maine Coast. We have explored the Wreck Island Great Blue Heron colony and farther out, Eastern Egg Rock where Atlantic Puffins breed. Geologic explorations of the rocky points have...
Opportunities for natural history education at American colleges and universities are in decline (Noss 1996, Futuyma 1998, Wilcove and Eisner 2000, Schmidly 2005, Tewksbury et al. 2014). Reduced natural history knowledge threatens scientific advancement (Futuyma 1998,...
London, 1948: a city in recovery. This is the post-war urban landscape in which Jacqueline Palmer began her career as an educator at the renowned Natural History Museum. Her passion in life was to make sure that going to a museum became “an exciting adventure” for...
Over a decade ago, I sat at a table in a dimly lit room with five ecologists talking about the restoration and use of degraded lands. One of them, a tropical ecologist who secretly harbored a fondness for birds and a penchant for the fiddle, blurted out, “What about...
Introduction One of the major challenges of university science education is to increase the quality of the undergraduate educational experience. Undergraduate classes in basic sciences such as biology have relied for several centuries on a traditional model of passive...
“Like most women she wished to exaggerate the significance of small deaths.” – Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) My naturalist tendencies, born in a desert of Joshua trees, asserted themselves more fully when I was twenty years old and studying...
A Reluctant Introduction I teethed on chalk. I think primary thoughts through pencil on yellow lined paper. But my professional life has been negotiated via keyboard. Half my life is pre-computer, half is post; at 43 I straddle the boundary between two worlds. Yet...
Dr. Steller was, for the most, not exactly a happy man, and in the last years of his short life he may at times have bitterly regretted having accepted Captain Bering’s offer to join his crew. The second Kamchatkan expedition of 1741 was the most expensive and most...
Naturalists keep field notes for a variety of reasons. They may attend to the intimate details of a single species, piecing together a behavioral ecology and natural history. At other times they may want to document species’ presence and abundance, or widen their...
Describing, recording, and drawing field observations represent the first steps of field-based scientific inquiry and creativity. These observations fuel description (“what” questions), hypothesis testing (“why” and “how” questions), experimental design, and...