All posts tagged with the-field-museum

In February 2016, the Biodiversity Heritage Library set out to digitize over 450,000 pages of field notes. While the BHL had already added some archival material to its collection before this project, the Field Notes Project is BHL’s largest undertaking of digitizing field notes to date.

We finished work on the project May 31, 2018 and are pleased to report that the project team digitized over 517,000 pages of field notes! 

One of the great aspects of the BHL Field Notes Project is how the field notes we are digitizing – and the naturalists who created them – have connections to multiple project partners. Edmund Heller is one of these interconnected naturalists. Heller was a naturalist active in the early twentieth century who participated in several expeditions sponsored by different institutions across the nation, including a number of BHL Field Notes Project partners.

In honor of the first Olympics to take place in Brazil, we are highlighting a book contributed by The Field Museum featuring birds of South America, Le Vaillant’s Histoire naturelle d’une partie d’oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l’Amerique et des Indes (1801). Among several titles chosen for digitization from the Field Museum Library’s impressive Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library, housed in the collections of the Mary W. Runnells Rare Book Room, the entry for the volume in Catalogue of the Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library characterizes it as “a work intended to supplement his Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux d’Afrique (q.v.) by describing and figuring birds not properly included in that work.”

Bryophytes are green land plants that lack true vascular tissue. They encompass mosses (Bryophyta), hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) and liverworts (Marchantiophyta). Bryophytes form an important component in many ecosystems, offering microhabitats for an abundance of biodiversity including single-celled eukaryotes, protozoa, and many invertebrates (Gerson 1982). They also play an important part in the global carbon budget and can support climate change research by serving as “indicators of past climate change, [validating] climate models, and as potential indicators of global warming”.