Philippa Kaur

For more than a decade, Christie Bahlai has been part of a long-running survey of ladybirds. Each summer, she and other scientists send students from their laboratories to a site on Gull Lake, Michigan, about 220 kilometres west of Detroit, to monitor 14 beetle species. Their goal: to track how invasive species are affecting native populations.The ladybird project has been running since 1989, and for 20 years had been directed by Douglas Landis, an entomologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing and Bahlai’s former postdoctoral adviser. But last year, Landis decided to retire. In December, he reached out to Bahlai, a computational ecologist at Kent State University in Ohio, to ask whether she wanted the many boxes of handwritten data sheets stored in his laboratory.
How to digitize your lab notebooks
Bahlai already had digital scans of the documents. Still, she wanted the originals. “What if there’s a note on the data that didn’t come through on the scans, or some other crucial context?” Bahlai explains. “And so, I received my inheritance over Christmas vacation.”Generally, “the easiest and most productive” way to compile data is to type them directly into a spreadsheet, says Miguel Acevedo, an ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. But using a computer, tablet or even a smartphone in the field isn’t always practical. The Puerto Rican rainforest, where Acevedo studies malaria infection in lizards, is prone to unexpected downpours, so his team logs its data in pencil-drawn tables in waterproof notebooks. Bahlai and her colleagues record species counts by hand while working in dusty cornfields, their fingers often covered in sticky insect-trap goo.To be useful, handwritten data must be digitized into a form that can be analysed. But because this is one step removed from data collection, the process is rife with potential for error. Whether carrying over data manually or using software tools such as optical character recognition (OCR), researchers need to think about how to keep damage to a minimum. Here are five tips to do just that.Make a digitization integrity planOne of the first things Acevedo tells his students is that correcting mistakes in data becomes an order of magnitude more difficult with every step towards publication. He calls this the 1/10/100 rule: incorrectly writing down a lizard’s length in millimetres instead of centimetres is easily fixed — a metaphorical $1 mistake. But the cost jumps to $10 if the data point slips through the digitization process, and to $100 after it’s been analysed. Standardized protocols and workflows help to prevent such errors and minimize the cost, he says.In Bahlai’s lab, a “meticulous and reliable” student volunteer transfers the data from the original paper sheets to Google Docs. They annotate anything that they’re unsure of — a smudged number, for example — and tag Bahlai, who will take a closer look. After a second student double-checks the data, Bahlai transfers them into a spreadsheet, for more in-depth quality checks.Acevedo’s set-up is different: students work in pairs, with one reading out the data and the other typing them in. He also insists on including in each notebook a metadata page that contains acronym definitions, units of measurement and other elements. “If somebody is looking at notebooks 20 years from now,” he says, “they’ll know exactly what they’re looking at.”Here’s another must-do, says Joel Correia, a human–environment geographer at Colorado State University in Fort Collins: invest the time and resources upfront to train the people doing the fieldwork. Correia studies the social and ecological effects of long-term land-stewardship practices in three Indigenous nations in the Ecuadorian Amazon. His team teaches members of those communities social-science research methods, such as designing and conducting interviews and surveys in their local language. In such multilingual, multicultural contexts, he says, having shared clarity around the concepts underlying the research is crucial, especially when taking written field notes that will be translated and digitized.Back up your paper, ASAPOnce you’re back from the field, do some rough digitization as soon as you can, Correia advises. Scanning your notebooks to PDFs, or even photocopying them, will safeguard you from the pain of seeing stacks of interviews destroyed by rain, fire or other unforeseen events. “I have not had that experience, but I have certainly heard of other people who have,” he says.Use several pairs of eyesOne common way of reducing errors is by having a number of people input the same data, and then correcting inconsistencies between the versions. How many pairs of eyeballs do you need? Make it an experiment, suggests Acevedo: test your error rate with different numbers of double-checkers, and find the point of diminishing return.

For her research, climatologist Linden Ashcroft often has to digitize historical sources, such as this page of climate data from 1837.Image courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: PP430/1, VOLUME 4.

But don’t overlook the human element, says Linden Ashcroft, a climatologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Ashcroft has run community-science efforts to digitize hand-written records in farmers’ diaries and other historical sources, some going back 200 years. She says that the World Meteorological Organization recommends that such data be double- or triple-keyed — that is, input independently by two or three people. But she knows of projects involving as many as eight individuals. “Is that really a good use of people’s time?”A good rule of thumb, Ashcroft suggests, is to calibrate your error rate to your project goals. “If you’re doing a deep dive into the weather and climate of a particular place, you want to lovingly correct the data,” she says. But if your data will be just a few of a million entries in an international database that researchers use to predict weather patterns, a slightly higher error rate probably won’t affect the outcome.Home in on outliersIf you are working with numbers, you can program your software to flag outliers, improperly formatted values and seemingly illogical data. For instance, Acevedo recalls discovering that lizards measured in one year were an order of magnitude smaller than usual. “I was there, so I knew that the lizards were not particularly small.” After he examined the notebooks from that period, he saw in the metadata that the numbers were recorded in millimetres rather than centimetres, and corrected the data.But that approach doesn’t always work, Ashcroft cautions. Outliers in her data can reflect unusually heavy rain or aberrations in atmospheric conditions, such as temperature or air pressure — real variation that is simply unexpected. “You don’t want the statistical test to kick those [values] out, because extremes are how we’re going to be affected climate change,” she says.Try OCR (and other software)OCR software can be used to convert scanned images into machine-encoded text. Many such tools are available — and most of them can successfully capture data sets in which handwritten text and numbers are written clearly and do not bleed out of their designated columns.But off-the-shelf software often falls short when applied to historical handwriting, in which s’s might look like f’s, for example, says Stuart Middleton, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton, UK. It also performs poorly in the face of image noise, such as creases or shadows in a scanned image or text that spills over from one column of a table into another. In the documents he works with, he says, “there are all sorts of horrors going on.”
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In such cases, researchers with a bit of computer-science savvy can try using different OCR models. Those models — available on the open-source machine-learning platform Hugging Face, for instance — are generally pre-trained on a wide array of images, but feeding them training images that are similar to your data could improve their performance, says Middleton. Scientists with advanced skills in coding and artificial intelligence can also modify the networks to better fit their projects. Middleton’s team is developing more-advanced, multistep OCR solutions for working with historical weather data, including new ways of training, as well as image post-processing.Options exist for digitizing other data types, too. Eliza Grames, an integrative biologist at Binghamton University in New York, uses historical data — largely graphs and charts from studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — to map long-term insect-population trends. A program called metaDigitise (and a similar, browser-based program, WebPlotDigitizer) allows her to redraw the plots and calculate the underlying data. She also uses Inkscape, an open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator, to digitize old species range data into a format that is readable by geographic-information-system mapping software.OCR still requires extensive expert oversight to clean up irregularities and check for errors, Ashcroft warns. She prefers to harness the efforts of volunteers around the world. “To me, the historical weather observations are a really valuable opportunity to engage people with climate science in a fun and easy way,” she says. “People get to be a part of the story.”And OCR is not always worth the trouble. For smaller projects, scanning every page and checking for errors after processing it through software might not yet be more efficient than having students do the job by hand, Acevedo says. But at the rate software is advancing, he says, that could soon change. “Maybe if we have this talk in 2025.” More

Credit: Matt Mays/Mays Entertainment

In 1979, ethologist Christophe Boesch and his wife Hedwige Boesch-Achermann began researching the behaviour of a community of wild West African chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire. Their study became the first long-term research on chimpanzees to be conducted in a continuous rainforest, rather than in a mixed savannah habitat such as Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where primatologist Jane Goodall had been working for almost two decades. It led to numerous discoveries about cultural diversity and behavioural variation — revealing, for example, that chimpanzees used hammers to crack nuts, that males cared altruistically for unrelated orphans and how predation by leopards influenced grouping patterns. Boesch argued that, because the Taï population was relatively undisturbed, it yielded a uniquely informative picture of chimpanzee behavioural adaptations. The Taï project remains the only study of a large population of habituated West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), a rapidly dwindling subspecies (taichimpproject.org). He has died aged 72.Boesch promoted the conservation of chimpanzees by organizing population surveys, launching chimpanzee-research sites and driving the creation of national parks, including Moyen-Bafing National Park in Guinea. When faced with obstacles, from changing governments and obstructive mining companies to sceptical donor agencies, he had little patience for bureaucracy or unnecessary delays. He envisaged a continuous protected area that stretched from Senegal to Côte d’Ivoire and pursued this goal through the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF), which he and Boesch-Achermann co-founded in 2000. Under Boesch’s leadership, the WCF engaged local people and lobbied industries and ministries to avert threats from mining activities and infrastructural development. The foundation continues to lead conservation efforts in West Africa.Boesch was born in St Gallen, Switzerland, in 1951. When he was 12 years old, his father, a professor of cultural psychology, gave him King Solomon’s Ring by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, a 1949 book that stimulated Boesch’s lifelong interest in animal behaviour. He attended secondary school in Paris and returned to Switzerland to study biology at the University of Geneva. His first experience of field work with great apes was in Rwanda, studying mountain gorillas as an assistant to US primatologist Dian Fossey.
Chimpanzees are dying from our colds — these scientists are trying to save them
After learning that chimpanzees in Taï use natural hammers to crack open edible nuts, the Boesches spent five years habituating a wild community there to their presence, much of the time in the field spent together with their two young children. At first, the chimpanzees invariably fled, so that for many years the research was, in Boesch’s words, “a study of chimpanzee behinds”. Persistence paid off and led to a PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 1984 and to an assistant professorship at the University of Basel in 1991.In 1997, Boesch became one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. By then, research in Taï was producing rich data on three neighbouring communities, shedding light on intergroup dynamics and social traditions. In 1999, together with Andrew Whiten, Boesch organized a comparison of the behavioural diversity of seven chimpanzee populations. The resulting paper took the study of chimpanzee cultural variation to an increasingly systematic level and galvanized further work throughout Africa (A. Whiten et al. Nature 399, 682–685; 1999). Boesch set up an ambitious project to collect chimpanzee data from more than 50 sites in 18 countries. This project found evidence that chimpanzee cultural diversity had been reduced by human influences, suggesting that the conservation of these animals needs to include the protection of their local traditions.
These animals are racing towards extinction. A new home might be their last chance
Boesch thought that scientists routinely underestimated the cognitive complexity of chimpanzees, for example in their abilities to cooperate, teach their young or use several tool sets; and that studies of chimpanzees in captivity tended to have little relevance to understanding their behaviour in the wild. His pioneering findings often went against prevailing scientific thinking, but he trusted his eyes and never shied away from defending his views.By the 1990s, chimpanzees in Taï were dying from pathogens, such as anthrax, Ebola and respiratory viruses, that decimated Boesch’s study community and endangered human observers. Boesch introduced safety measures and organized studies that led to the first direct evidence of viruses being transmitted from humans to wild apes.In an era when painstaking fieldwork appealed less to students than did seemingly swifter rewards from laboratory experiments, Boesch insisted on the merits of old-fashioned patience: “Go to the field,” he would tell his students. “Observe the chimpanzees and don’t worry about the textbooks — the chimpanzees will teach you!”His passion and enthusiasm for chimpanzee research and conservation were contagious. And Boesch inspired a generation of primatologists. Inza Koné, president of the African Primatological Society, referred to Boesch as the father of primatology in Côte d’Ivoire, a characterization that could fairly be extended to West Africa as a whole. Early in Boesch’s career, he realized that each chimpanzee population is unique and that connecting separate populations is the key to their survival. His more than four decades of devotion to studying and protecting wild chimpanzees leaves a lasting impact on their survival and our knowledge of this species. More

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
28 February 2024

In a large US cohort of mother–child dyads, prenatal exposure to phthalate metabolites was associated with varying degrees of negative birth outcomes. More

Species extinctions are speeding up worldwide. Biodiversity monitoring and assessment must underpin efforts to tackle this crisis (E. Tekwa et al. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 378, 20220181; 2023). Yet expertise in taxonomy, the scientific basis for biodiversity research and management, has been in decline.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

Download the 26 February long read podcastThe phenomenon of animals catching diseases from humans, called reverse zoonoses, has had a severe impact on great ape populations, often representing a bigger threat than habitat loss or poaching.However, while many scientists and conservationists agree that human diseases pose one of the greatest risks to great apes today there are a few efforts under way to use a research-based approach to mitigate this problem.This is an audio version of our Feature Chimpanzees are dying from our colds — these scientists are trying to save themNever miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for Nature Podcast is available too. More

Download the Nature Podcast 22 February 2024The deep haunting tones of the world’s largest animals, baleen whales (mysticetes), are iconic. But how the songs are produced has long been a mystery. Whales evolved from land dwelling mammals, which vocalize by passing air through a structure called the larynx — a structure that also helps keep food from entering the respiratory system. However, toothed whales such as dolphins do not use their larynx to make sound, instead they have evolved a specialized organ in their nose. Now a team of researchers have discovered the structure used by baleen whales — a modified version of the larynx. Whales like humpbacks and blue whales are able to create powerful vocalizations but their anatomy also limits the frequency of the sounds they can make and depth at which they can sing. This leaves them unable to escape anthropogenic noise pollution that occurs in the same range.Article: Evolutionary novelties underlie sound production in baleen whalesSubscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too. More

The LeDNA project will disperse hundreds of volunteers to sample environmental DNA from the world’s lakes.Credit: K. Deiner

In a first-of-its-kind project, researchers are tapping into the power of citizen science to collect DNA samples from hundreds of lakes worldwide. Not only will the resulting cache of environmental DNA (eDNA) be the largest ever gathered from an aquatic setting in a single day — it could yield a fuller picture of the state of biodiversity around the globe and improve scientists’ understanding of how species move about over time.
Rare bird’s detection highlights promise of ‘environmental DNA’
Scientists are increasingly using eDNA — which is shed by all organisms — to evaluate the presence of species in a given environment. Researchers have shown that it can be cheaply and efficiently extracted from water1, soil2, ice cores3 and filters from air-monitoring stations4. It has even been used to detect endangered species that haven’t been spotted for years, including a Brazilian frog species (putatively assigned to Megaelosia bocainensis) that researchers thought went extinct in the 1960s5.Kristy Deiner, an environmental scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich who leads the massive lake project, says that eDNA represents a “paradigm shift” in how scientists monitor biodiversity. Deiner’s research group has already received applications from more than 500 people across 101 countries to participate in collecting eDNA from their local lakes and shipping the samples to ETH Zurich.These global-scale projects are “really what the eDNA community needs”, says Philip Francis Thomsen, an environmental scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark and a volunteer for the lake project.“By involving citizens, we not only increase the geographical scope of our sampling but also foster a sense of public ownership and awareness regarding global biodiversity issues,” says Cátia Lúcio Pereira, the project’s coordinator, who works with Deiner at ETH Zurich.A boon for biodiversityAlthough eDNA is generally considered to be a boon for biodiversity monitoring, researchers recognize that it’s not perfect. For instance, DNA from a particular site might come from a species that just briefly passed through the region, rather than living there. And researchers don’t have a clear understanding of how factors such as microbial ingestion of the DNA, high temperatures and ultraviolet radiation degrade the genetic material once it has been shed, or how those factors might alter the list of species detected.Deiner acknowledges the limitations, but says that eDNA-monitoring technology has come a long way since it was first used decades ago. She and her team have a plan to carefully handle the samples they receive, extract their genetic material and amplify the plant and animal DNA to detect the presence of species.“We’re more fine-tuning things now,” Deiner says.

Source: LeDNA.

Deiner also doesn’t necessarily see the transfer of eDNA from one region to another as a negative thing — it could even be used to her advantage. She began studying how eDNA moves in rivers about ten years ago. The genetic material, she suggests, could flow from soil, down rivers and into lakes, making these watery pools the ideal location to sample from to get an idea of the species diversity of an entire region, or catchment.Her project — called LeDNA, which stands for lake eDNA — aims to prove that the eDNA from a lake represents not just lake-dwelling species, but also terrestrial animals that live along the rivers that feed into the lake and around the lake itself. It will also examine the differences in species richness between geographical regions, and try to decipher how species in various habitats might be interacting with one another.Local samplingDeiner’s research group recruited volunteers for LeDNA through a combination of social media, networking with other eDNA researchers and reaching out to citizen-science groups. The recruits will be assigned a lake near them from a curated list of 5,000 around the globe.“We really worked hard to try and reach a lot of these areas so that the sample is truly a global effort,” Deiner says.
Accidental DNA collection by air sensors could revolutionize wildlife tracking
Although the team hasn’t finalized the lakes that it will sample, it hopes to include about 800, says Lúcio Pereira (see ‘Sampling sites’). The researchers also say that they have mostly finished their recruiting phase, although they still want more volunteers in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.Once assigned a lake, volunteers will receive instructions and a water-sampling filter. They will all aim to gather their samples on the same day — 22 May, which is the International Day for Biological Diversity — although there is a flexible two-week window for collection if they need it.Francis Thomsen points out that hundreds of people taking samples might lead to issues with data quality, depending on how closely they each follow the set protocols sent to them. Sampling eDNA, however, is easier to standardize than other biodiversity-monitoring methods, in which surveyors typically have to locate and identify individual species in person, he says.Lúcio Pereira says that the team recognizes the possible threat to data quality, but that the volunteers will all have identical sampling kits and in-depth training on the sampling protocol.A perk of participating in the project, particularly for eDNA scientists, is that local partners will be able to use their data in their own research, as well as contribute to LeDNA publications. “What’s cool about this is it’s participatory,” says Rachel Meyer, director of the California eDNA programme, which is run by University of California researchers and matches volunteers with scientists to collect eDNA samples across the state. The data is there “if people want it”, she says, “and there’s plenty of incentive to want it”. More

More than 40% of migratory species are declining, according to a United Nations report. Sanderlings breed in the Arctic before travelling to North and South America.Credit: Getty

Earlier this month, conservationists and biodiversity scientists received some rare, good news at the first meeting of a much-anticipated fund for projects aimed at preserving Earth’s biodiversity. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) will provide grants for projects that protect biodiversity, especially in countries with a high variety of marine and terrestrial life, as measured by a global biodiversity index (see go.nature.com/3wekupz). So far, five nations — Canada, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom — have pledged money to the tune of US$219 million.At the meeting on 8 and 9 February, the GBFF’s co-chairperson, Costa Rica’s former environment and energy minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, called the fund’s establishment “one of his proudest and most significant moments”, and he urged other countries to support the initiative, too. They should — and fast.
The ‘Bill Gates problem’: do billionaire philanthropists skew global health research?
Research suggesting that urgent action is needed to stem biodiversity loss is regularly published. The latest warnings come from the United Nations’ first report that looks at the state of the world’s migratory species — billions of birds, fish, insects, mammals and reptiles travel thousands of kilometres each year for food or to breed (see go.nature.com/4bxrmag). Published on 12 February by the UN Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, the report reveals that 44% of migratory species are declining, and that 22% of them are threatened with extinction. There is no time to lose.The launch of a global public fund for biodiversity is rare. The GBFF’s parent fund, the Global Environment Facility in Washington DC, was established more than three decades ago with an initial endowment of $1 billion. Between 2022 and 2026, it plans to distribute $840 million between 45 projects related to biodiversity, climate, international waters and land degradation.But the GBFF has an extra purpose: to help countries to achieve targets for slowing down and, eventually, halting the decline in global biodiversity. These targets, agreed at a UN biodiversity meeting (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, in December 2022, are collectively known as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. One goal is to protect and restore 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030.
Can the world save a million species from extinction?
These UN-mediated funds are just one source of biodiversity funding. In 2019, private and public sources contributed between $78 billion and $143 billion, according to a landmark 2021 review of biodiversity economics for the UK government (see go.nature.com/49fe686). But even this is a fraction of the up-to $967 billion needed annually to achieve the 2030 targets, according to a study of biodiversity financing (G. A. Karolyi & J. Tobin-de la Puente Financ. Manage. 52, 231–251; 2023). And that means the $219 million that countries have promised to the GBFF is, perhaps literally, a drop in the ocean.Other wealthy countries must contribute, too. More than two years ago, China established the Kunming Biodiversity Fund, worth $235 million. Yet this fund is still not operational. It needs to be allocated to projects as soon as possible. And the United States, too, should contribute an amount to the GBFF that reflects the size of its economy. In 2022, the US Agency for International Development contributed $383 million to biodiversity conservation programmes worldwide.Returns on investmentThe fact that the GBFF is committed to providing grants, not loans is important. But this might also be one of the reasons why current pledges are not being translated into funds that can be distributed. Climate funds, for example, are given mostly as loans and not grants. They support renewable energy projects, for instance, or factories that make electric batteries — meaning that international donors could expect to make money on what are essentially investments. By contrast, biodiversity funds that support projects to protect wetlands for migratory birds or manage agricultural lands in nature-friendly ways often do not provide returns — at least not in terms of cash. This is partly because current economic systems fail to see the value that a healthy planet provides through biodiversity and ecosystem services.
The answer to the biodiversity crisis is not more debt
To help increase the pot of money, the GBFF will accept funding from philanthropic foundations — an increasingly important source of environment and development grants. Getting such foundations to contribute to international public funds is not easy, and it’s good to see GBFF advocates working on persuading them. Foundations will need to give up some of their autonomy in deciding on which projects will receive a grant. But they should see the invitation to participate in the GBFF as a benefit, rather than a burden. The fund’s global nature means that more biodiversity projects can receive grants. This could help more parts of the planet and greater numbers of people than when projects are funded by a foundation on its own. Having foundations participate in international public funds can only be a good thing, especially at a time when they are in the spotlight for a perceived lack of accountability.Getting nearly 200 countries to reach an agreement on the make-up of any new institution, and then getting donors to fund it, is one of the hardest parts of multilateral policymaking. The architects of the GBFF should be congratulated on getting their fund off the ground and securing an early round of pledges. It’s now time to translate words into action. More