A plaque in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is engraved with a prophetic quote from founding director Joseph Grinnell. In 1910, Grinnell said “the value of the museum will not be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century.” Only after such a long time passed could researchers benefit from hindsight, comparing today’s fauna to the snapshot Grinnell and his colleagues took of California’s wildlife during a landmark survey launched in 1904. A century later, UC Berkeley scientists are finally taking that look backward as they follow in Grinnell’s footsteps through Yosemite National Park.
The Grinnell Resurvey Project, launched in 2003 by museum director Craig Moritz, is in the process of revisiting more than 200 locations that Grinnell and his team surveyed. Over the next five years leading up to the Museum’s centenary, the scientists will document and collect tens of thousands of mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles from a range of habitats representing much of California’s unparalleled biodiversity. Part of a National Park Service initiative to monitor wildlife in the country’s parks, the Grinnell Resurvey Project is the first inventory of this scale in Yosemite since Grinnell traversed the park eighty years ago.
“Comparing the data from then and now will provide knowledge about the dynamics of the species and the related changes in climate and habitat,” says former museum director Jim Patton, who retired from the faculty of the Department of Integrative Biology in 2001.
Yosemite Then and Now
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