Photographs from the 1930 become vital data for climate research

NATURE | NEWS FEATURE

180,000 forgotten photos reveal the future of Greenland’s ice

To tell whether the island’s glacial cap will melt away any time soon, researchers are poring over old pictures and drawings for clues to its past behaviour.

Quirin Schiermeier
27 July 2016


“The instantaneous record contained in the air and terrestrial photographs of the present state of the glaciers of the entire coast is in itself of great value for future researchers,” the Danish captain Carl Gabel-Jørgensen wrote in a 1935 report.

Amateur photographs reveal population history of a colonial seabird

Article in Current Biology
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)30059-8




Long-term datasets are necessary to examine human impacts on ecosystems [1] . However, standardized scientific inquiry generally only dates back 30–40 years. Therefore, alternative approaches are necessary to obtain long-term ecological data. For example, previous studies have used newspaper reports to derive fish catch rates [2] , historical photographs to study phenology [3] and fish size distribution [4] , as well as fish bone data from archaeological excavations to derive growth parameters [5] . Photographs have also been used to provide useful information about marine animal populations [6,7] . Inspired by these approaches, we collected and analysed amateur photographs of the major seabird colony in the Baltic Sea. Based on these photographs, we reconstructed a uniquely long (98 years) time series of the population trend of common guillemots (Uria aalge). We found that the population has increased from low numbers in the early 20^th century, to a historically high level today. Changing population trends appear linked to variable human influence on this marine ecosystem.