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...