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...
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...
In the midst of a global biodiversity crisis and human-driven changes in the composition and function of the earth’s ecosystems, the documentation of the world’s organisms is one of the primary scientific goals of this century and is made increasingly possible by...
Natural history instruction is made more successful when students make their own natural observations, effectively communicate these observations, and achieve an understanding of place (Gilligan 2009, Fleischner 2011, Farnsworth and Beatty 2012). This rarely can be...