Opening the museum’s vault: Historical field records preserve reliable ecological data

Museum specimens have long served as foundational data sources for ecological, evolutionary, and environmental research. Continued reimagining of museum collections is now also generating new types of data associated with, but beyond physical specimens, a concept known as “extended specimens”. Field notes penned by generations of naturalists contain first-hand ecological observations associated with museum collections and comprise a form of extended specimens with the potential to provide novel ecological data spanning broad geographic and temporal scales. Despite their data-yielding potential, however, field notes remain underutilized in research due to their heterogeneous, unstandardized, and qualitative nature. We introduce an approach for transforming descriptive ecological notes into quantitative data suitable for statistical analysis. Tests with simulated and real-world published data show that field notes and our transformation approach retain reliable quantitative ecological information under a range of sample sizes and evolutionary scenarios. Unlocking the wealth of data contained within field records could facilitate investigations into the ecology of clades whose diversity, distribution, or other demographic features present challenges to traditional ecological studies, improve our understanding of long-term environmental and evolutionary change, and enhance predictions of future change.

Methods
Simulations are performed using the R code provided.

Real-world data is provided as excel documents. This data was downloaded from previously pubished articles and reduced to retain only the variables used in our study. See article and codes for citations for these articles.