Did you know that the city of Boston is blessed with one of the largest and the oldest urban forest reservations in America?

Photo: Charles Eliot, 1897

At the turn of the 20th century, Boston saw a rapid increase in human settlement and industrialization which quickly transformed the once pristine Commonwealth into a highly developed, unsightly, and unhealthy metropolis. The movement to preserve what was left of Greater Boston’s natural wonders was inspired by the writings by transcendental thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who were advocates of the idea to “keep the New World new.” Local activists for the cause included Wilson Flagg, Elizur Wright, Sylvester Baxter, and Charles Eliot. They envisioned a place where the citizens of Boston could escape the “noisy ugliness” of the overcrowded city and revitalize their spirits in the requiem of nature’s untamed beauty.

A Dream Comes to Pass 

Boston’s budding conservation movement had the foresight to identify large tracts of Massachusetts wilderness for preservation in perpetuity. A four decade campaign ensued and resulted in the passage of the Acts of 1893, Chapter 407 which established the Metropolitan Park Commission. This legal entity was charged with restoring, preserving, and increasing the beauty of the undeveloped woodlands surrounding Boston and this landmark legislation would serve as a model for other American cities. The Metropolitan Park Commission’s first order of business was to hire the noted landscape architecture firm, Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot, to survey the vegetation in the recently acquired woodland reservations, the Middlesex Fells, Beaver Brook, Stony Brook, and the Blue Hills.

Map of the original Metropolitan Park Reservations Click here for an interactive version.

The firm appointed landscape designer Warren H. Manning who led a team of twenty volunteers to complete the fieldwork. Local botanist Walter Deane was hired to compile and edit the survey’s findings and in 1896, he published the results in this month’s book of the month, Flora of the Blue Hills, Middlesex Fells, Stony Brook and Beaver Brook Reservations, of the Metropolitan Park Commission, Massachusetts. While Deane is credited with the organization of the specimens and botanical observations for publication, the project would not have been possible without collaboration among many amateur and professional botanists. This collaboration was so successful that it led to the formation of the New England Botanical Club (NEBC), which still meets regularly and has amassed a collection of 250,000 specimens housed in the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH).

Announcing a New BHL Collection

This example of an early successful citizen-science project is highlighted in the launch of a new collection in the BHL: The Archives from the Boston Metropolitan Park. This collection is composed of approximately 8,000 pages of manuscript material documenting the progress of the survey. Readers can peruse Walter Deane’s field notes, diaries, datebooks, and correspondence. His diaries reveal fascinating insights into his work on compiling the Flora and the details of its publication, as well as how the formation of the NEBC resulted from the Metropolitan Flora survey. His diaries also give rich pictures of the botanists of his time and are highly useful to anyone writing about the history of the NEBC and its members. The collection is now freely available and opens up this fascinating slice of history to the public for the first time. As part of the Connecting Content project, the digitization of the archives and original specimens from the Metropolitan Park Reservation was made possible by an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant.

Collection Highlights

One of the most compelling aspects of the correspondence related to the Metropolitan Flora survey is learning about people and information not evident from Deane’s Flora or from the botanical specimens. One example is a letter from the tree expert Loren Dame to Manning in which he encloses a list of trees compiled by a “non-botanist”, George Perry. Perry states that “I have made it a point to crawl through the densest tangle of greenbrier and thicket… to become familiar with every rod of the section.” As a result of his efforts, his list of trees is very thorough. He also found some very rare plants not seen by other surveyors, including maidenhair fern. Unfortunately, because he wasn’t considered a reliable source, his data wasn’t included. In another letter to Manning, Dame reported three rare tree species found only in an area adjacent to the Fells, which was added to the reservation after Flora was published. All of these omissions are significant, and the knowledge revealed in these letters is highly valuable for understanding the full extent of the past flora of the area.

Surveying the Flora of Middlesex Fells: Yesterday and Today

Between 2003 and 2011 a new survey  very much like the original survey of the Fells flora was undertaken by a team of NEBC and HUH botanists. Using Deane’s Flora as a basis for comparison, the team found that most of the native species from the original survey persist, despite substantial increases in the number and frequency of non-native plants. These native species face several threats, including habitat disturbance, and loss due to construction and recreational use of the Fells, herbivory from increases in deer and insect populations, as well as environmental changes effected by climate change and afforestation. Sustaining populations of native species, some of which are rare and endangered, will require a more active management of the Fells.[1]

Urban forests purify the air that we breathe, provide a habitat for local flora and fauna, help reduce energy demands, provide recreational opportunities, reduce stress and crime rates—the list goes on. Since eighty percent of us live in urban areas most of us owe quite a bit of thanks to the astute conservationists who fought to keep the untamed wilderness close by. Now it’s our turn to preserve their legacy.

Spot Pond named by Governor John Winthrop in 1631. Photo by Mike Ryan, Friends of the Fells

“Something like five miles northerly from Boston lies a great tract of country, all stony hills and table-lands, almost uninhabited, and of wonderful picturesqueness, and wild rugged beauty… and at its heart is that most beautiful of Boston’s suburban lakes, Spot Pond, which lies high up among the hills.” Sylvester Baxter, 1886.

Notes

Learn More!

IMLS Grant Project Page
Walter Deane (1848-1930) Papers
NPS: Metropolitan Parks Commision
Friends of the Fells
Found in the Fells
The Middlesex Fells, a Flourishing Urban Forest by W. Kittredge
BHL Collection: Archives and Specimens from the Boston Metropolitan Park Flora 

Mining Biodiversity (MiBIO): innovative computational techniques to mine BHL texts

On January 15, 2014, ten international research funders from four countries jointly announced the winners of the third Digging into Data Challenge, a competition to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.

Fourteen international teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States will receive grants totaling approximately $5.1 million to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to “Big Data”.  Their work will address the evolving nature of humanities and social sciences research, which often relies on massive multisource datasets.  Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and information professionals from leading universities and libraries in Europe and North America.

The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge was held in 2009 and the second in 2011. Previous Digging into Data research projects have received international attention.  The 2013 winners were selected from among 69 applications and address a wide variety of topics.  Among the sponsoring bodies, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced, on January 15, 2014, the winners of the third Digging into Data Challenge that they will fund.  IMLS’s contribution of $424,591 supports the American researchers from three of the mentioned fourteen international teams: the Missouri Botanical Garden, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of South Carolina.

As part of an international team involving partners in UK, Canada and the USA, Missouri Botanical Garden was awarded $175,000 by the IMLS to lead the USA members of the Mining Biodiversity Project team in applying innovative computational techniques to biodiversity texts and help improve the way we view, access and share the knowledge contained with in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Mining Biodiversity (MiBIO) Project
Principal Investigators:

• (United Kingdom) Sophia Ananiadou, Director of the National Centre for Text Mining and Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester;
• (Canada) Anatoliy Gruzd, Director of the SocialMedia Lab and Associate Professor at Dalhousie University;
• (USA) William Ulate Rodríguez, Global Coordinator & Technical Director for US/UK of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Senior Project Manager of the Center for Biodiversity Informatics at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

The MiBIO project is an international collaboration (UK, Canada, USA), leveraging large-scale data resources collected and curated by BHL members in US and worldwide, a digital portal developed and maintained by the BHL Technical staff at Missouri Botanical Garden and managed by the BHL Secretariat at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, text mining resources developed by the UK partner (NaCTeM), and social media, visualization and text cleaning methodologies developed by the Canadian partner (Dalhousie).

The project’s prime objective is to promote the efficient access to and sharing of large-scale biodiversity legacy literature by the worldwide community of science libraries, museums and the interested public The project will integrate novel text mining methods, visualization, crowdsourcing and social media into the BHL to provide a semantic search system aimed to transform BHL into a next-generation social digital library resource that facilitates the study and discussion (via social media integration) of legacy science documents on biodiversity by a worldwide community.

By promoting the development of capabilities that will foster collaboration among researchers from the fields of History of Science, Environmental History, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science and Social Media, the project hopes to make a significant impact on the above disciplines by (1) enriching a large-scale library, i.e., the BHL, via innovative application of Text Mining techniques to produce semantic metadata and a term inventory, (2) providing improved access to biodiversity-related digital artifacts via an enhanced search engine and visualization of results and (3) stimulating increased collaboration, interaction and sharing of information among BHL users via the social media environment.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Our mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. Our grant making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, the sponsoring funding bodies include:

• Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom),
• Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom),
• Canada Foundation for Innovation (Canada),
• National Endowment for the Humanities (United States),
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada),
• National Science Foundation (United States),
• Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in collaboration with The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) (Netherlands),
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

The U.K. charity Jisc will be providing professional program management in the progression of the United Kingdom projects.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, the BHL has digitized millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing tens of thousands of titles and over 100,000 volumes.

The Missouri Botanical Garden’s mission is “to discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment in order to preserve and enrich life.” Today, 153 years after opening, the Missouri Botanical Garden is a National Historic Landmark and a center for science, conservation, education and horticultural display.

The Center for Biodiversity Informatics (CBI) at the Missouri Botanical Garden seeks to provide innovative technology solutions to the global community of life science scholars in order to mobilize, integrate, and repatriate data about the world’s biodiversity.

Find more information at:

MiBIO Project Website: www.nactem.ac.uk/DID-MIBIO/

Official Winners Announcement: http://www.diggingintodata.org/Home/AwardRecipientsRound32013/tabid/201/Default.aspx

IMLS Press Release: http://www.imls.gov/5.1_million_awarded_for_delving_into_big_humanities_and_social_science_data.aspx
Dalhousie University Press Release: http://www.dal.ca/news/2014/01/22/natural-history-for-the-digital-age.html

This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services [Grant number LG-00-14-0032-14].

Pictured left to right:  Rob Guralnick, Mike Lichtenberg, Kyle Jaebker, Trish Rose-Sandler, Guarav Vaidya, Joel Richard, Doug Holland, William Ulate.  Not pictured:  Chris Freeland, Mike Blomberg, Chuck Miller.

The NEH-funded Art of Life project recently held its second face to face meeting November 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Institutions represented were from the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder); Washington University, St Louis (WUSTL), and Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL).

The team focused primarily on how to bring the algorithm work to a close.  The IMA developed four algorithms for identifying which pages in the BHL corpus contain images.  Those algorithms were run across a gold standard set of 40k pages to determine their accuracy and performance.  Two of the four algorithms were deemed to be useful (accuracy ratings were above 80%).  Currently, an environment is being established to enable efficient processing of those two algorithms across the entire corpus of 40+ million pages.  There was also discussion on how to refine the functionality of the Macaw tool which will be used to broadly classify the page images into groups such as illustrations, photographs, diagrams/tables, and maps.  Further work on the schema included efforts to create an application profile based on VRA Core and Darwin Core element sets.   Finally, the team wrapped up the meeting by investigating bulk uploads of large numbers of images to Flickr and Wikimedia Commons as well as how to then extract the resulting crowdsourced metadata back into the BHL portal.

Notes and action items from the meeting can be found on the Art of Life site  http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life.

Pictured left to right:  Kyle Jaebker, Joel Richard, Mike Lichtenberg, Mike Blomberg, William Ulate, Doug Holland, Guarav Vaidya, Chris Freeland. Not pictured:  Chuck Miller, Rob Guralnick

Questions about the project’s goals, progress, and technology can be directed to Principal Investigator, Trish Rose-Sandler at trish.rose-sandler [at] mobot.org.  The Art of Life project runs from May 1, 2012 through April 30, 2014 and is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

BHL Quarterly Report, Q4 FY13

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that BHL provides free and open access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature.  But did you also know that BHL is working to change the nature of biodiversity research through digitization?

In addition to the over 2 million pages scanned by BHL participating libraries in the past twelve months, BHL also co-launched the NESCent-EOL-BHL research sprint which will support research projects seeking answers to important biodiversity and ecological questions through mining BHL and EOL; received an IMLS National Leadership Grant for enhancing full text searching and indexing in BHL through purposeful gaming; organized a social media campaign around unsung biodiversity hero Alfred Russel Wallace; and hosted five interns to build social media, marketing, and reference skills in the next generation of librarians.

Learn all about these developments, and see how our project is performing in the latest BHL Quarterly Report and Newsletter!  Stay up to date in the future by subscribing to our quarterly newsletters.

We know you’ll be impressed at the ways we’re inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge!

BHL Fall 2013 Newsletter