![]() Read on to explore Ellwood’s account of her research to date and topics for further investigation. In fact, as Ellwood shares, “In this particular case, the text and images in BHL have not only improved my research but have even driven it.”Įllwood shared her preliminary research findings at the 2018 BHL Annual Meeting during an evening reception hosted by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Since BHL has proven to be such a valuable source of information for her research, it was the natural place for Ellwood to turn with questions surrounding the possibility of western passenger pigeon populations. All in all, I have a deep appreciation for BHL’s contributions to the digital landscape.” Had I to do it again, a good portion of that time and energy would be saved by using information available through BHL. “I have painstakingly used texts that have later been digitized by BHL. “I know firsthand that weeks of travel to various libraries and special collections is resource and time-intensive,” shares Ellwood. The Library has saved her precious time during these research projects. When working on a research project, Ellwood sometimes accesses BHL daily for months at a time, reading publications online, taking notes and citation information as she goes, and downloading custom PDFs as needed. I have crossed paths with BHL staff and affiliates at conferences near and far and appreciate not only their digitization work, but equally their work to engage the online community in their efforts.” “I have used BHL to fill in datasets with historical data, to research foundational information, and, let’s be honest, just to look at the beautiful images. ![]() ![]() “It may sound like hyperbole, but BHL truly is an invaluable resource,” lauds Ellwood. Since then, the Library has had a significant impact on her research. She first discovered BHL several years ago during her postdoc at iDigBio, a national resource for digitizing natural history collections and associated information. For the past year, she has been engaged as a Research Fellow at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum. Photo credit: Deborah Paul, Florida State University.Įllwood has been studying ecology, and its intersection with climate change, conservation, and citizen science, for ten years. Libby Ellwood to ask this very question and embark on a research project empowered by the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collections.ĭr. Passenger pigeon bones uncovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California inspired Dr. But could there have been resident populations in the western U.S.? While stories of passenger pigeon flocks blackening the skies underscore the species’ once staggering abundance, its distribution was concentrated in the eastern United States. The last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden at about 1pm on September 1, 1914. The population declined from billions to none in less than one hundred years. ![]() Once the most abundant bird species in North America, it was hunted relentlessly, with large-scale commercial hunting facilitated by railroad distribution placing excessive pressure on the species. The passenger pigeon’s demise is one of the most infamous examples of human-caused extinction. Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries. Passenger pigeon ( Ectopistes migratorius).
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