Infrastructure and the ethnographic-cartographic production of urban bird species richness

The qualitative bio-geographies of human geographers and the quantitative mappings of biogeographers share a goal: how to understand living with non-human life. Yet they rarely bridge the conceptual and methodological gap between them. This paper theorizes how the concept of infrastructure can bridge this ethnographic-cartographic divide. Infrastructure is not just an inanimate shell. It is also a system of relation, a dynamic patterning of socionatural form emerging out of the experiences and affective moments of its constituents. As a proof of concept, we quantified and compared urban bird species richness and frequency for Tallahassee, Florida over a 17-year period (2000–2017) for two co-occurring observational infrastructures, eBird and a wildlife rehabilitation center that serves the city. Species common to both infrastructures comprised 94% of all eBird observations and 99% of all rehab records. Their differences reflected contrasts in how the motivations for experiencing birds in...

人文地理学者所开展的质性生物地理学研究，与生物地理学者的量化制图研究拥有共同的核心目标：理解如何与非人类生命共生。然而二者却鲜有能够弥合彼此间的概念与方法鸿沟。本文从理论层面探讨了基础设施（infrastructure）概念如何弥合这一民族志与制图学之间的分野。基础设施绝非仅仅是无生命的实体外壳，它同时也是一套关系系统，是由其构成要素的体验与情感性时刻所催生的社会自然形态的动态模式。作为概念验证，我们针对美国佛罗里达州塔拉哈西市，对两项并行运行的观测基础设施——eBird与服务该市的野生动物救助中心——在2000年至2017年这17年间的城市鸟类物种丰富度与出现频次进行了量化与对比分析。两项基础设施共有的鸟类物种占eBird所有观测记录的94%，占野生动物救助中心所有救助记录的99%。二者的差异则反映了人们体验鸟类的动机差异在……