Among Grinnell's legacies was the first field survey of Yosemite National Park conducted at a time when the park's unique and fragile habitat was feeling the pressure of increasing tourism. His survey led to recommendations for managing and preserving the park, among them, elimination of agriculture and removal of a small zoo from the valley.
Yosemite's Thompson said he keeps a copy of Grinnell's published study near his desk and refers to it frequently.
"Grinnell had a very prominent place in the development of science in the park service," he said. He expects to make full use of the current survey.
The Yosemite field notes once generated by Grinnell, Storer and their team alone number 2,000 pages, and the combined team put in about 1,000 hours of field work in the park.
"We're going back through the field notes containing all the original information to do an exact comparison between today and 80 years ago, which is a remarkable thing," said James Patton, who has been leading this summer's survey teams. Patton is a curator in the museum, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of integrative biology and an expert on small mammals.
To make these comparisons, the team is revisiting initially about 10 of the 22 sites surveyed by Grinnell and Storer within the boundaries of Yosemite. Assuming funding comes through, museum scientists will revisit the remainder of the 22 "Grinnell" sites in the park, plus add some new ones in the northern tier, an area of the park Grinnell did not visit.
"Soon after I arrived at the museum (in 2000), I sat down and read a paper Grinnell wrote in 1910 on the uses of a research museu
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Contact: Robert Sanders
rls@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
5-Aug-2003