Rare Books | Digest Summer 2024 Jonathan Shipley

How Rare Books and Archives Are Helping Us to Understand Our Changing Natural World

Climate change and shifting ecologies are studied through herbaria, whaling logbooks, and historic farmers' notes
Courtesy Alma Mater Studiorum/Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna

A 500-year-old herbarium collected by Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna includes specimens like Solanum lycopersicum (left), commonly known as the tomato plant, which originated in the Americas, and Cucurbita pepo (right), a cultivated plant from the Americas that yields varieties of squash and pumpkin. The specimens are allowing twenty-first-century botanists to examine changes in the ecology of northern Italy.

Thanks to the meticulous notes of centuries-old botanists, farmers, and hearty sailors plying the ocean’s depths, researchers can use rare books and records to understand how things were, how things are, and how things could be in regard to our changing climate. In 1551, Ulisse Aldrovandi wandered the hillsides of Bologna, Italy, collecting flowers and plants. The naturalist and philosopher, whom Carl Linnaeus would later call the father of natural history, took his bounty of flora home and carefully labeled them, wrote down his observations, and pressed all of them in an herbarium.

Five thousand plants were delicately preserved—including Cucurbita (squash), Capsicum annuum (sweet pepper), and Nigella damascena (love-in-a-mist) —in fifteen volumes. Aldrovandi included notes on species frequency, abundance, ecology, local names, and uses in folk medicine. The books record one of the first known botany expeditions. They were later preserved at the University of Bologna, where Aldrovandi taught. 

Some 500 years later, Fabrizio Buldrini, a research fellow in the University of Bologna’s Department of Biological, Geological, and Environmental Sciences, came upon Aldrovandi’s herbarium and was fascinated. Due to Aldrovandi’s work, Buldrini could investigate how the local landscape had changed and understand what plants remained and what plants had disappeared. The herbarium could further tell Buldrini, who began his ongoing research in the early 2000s, about how the climate has changed and how it may continue to do so. 

“Herbaria are true time machines and are extremely important,” Buldrini said. “A herbarium specimen is the solid, tangible proof of the presence of a species in space and time.”
In Aldrovandi’s time, four percent of plants in Bologna were from the Americas, most of which were contained in private gardens. Now, thirty-four percent of Bologna’s native landscape is composed of non-native species, impacting local environments and sometimes devastating ecosystems. “These values are frightening,” Buldrini said, “and an unequivocal sign of profound human impact.”

Because Aldrovandi preserved his day’s walks in books, Buldrini could retrace the experience of moving through an environment of the past. “Knowing things have changed,” Buldrini said, “we can learn to cope with these changes.” 

The damage, he knows after looking through Aldrovandi’s volumes, has been done. Bologna’s biodiversity is irrevocably changed. “Currently, it is no longer possible to correct the situation in the Bologna province,” Buldrini said. “It is too late to even try any kind of containment.”

Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum (2)

Hundreds of whaling logbooks have been digitized by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, making their ocean observations accessible to researchers, such as one from the Roman of New Bedford, Massachusetts, chronicling an 1835–39 voyage (left) and the Lucy Ann of Wilmington, Delaware, chronicling an 1841–44 voyage (right).

Yet he added, “We can change.” Though containment is out of the question, Buldrini believes that the careful study of past trends and events allows us to understand current tendencies. With that understanding, the possibility to develop the right strategies to mitigate the negative effects of climate and environmental change can occur. Perhaps Aldrovandi’s love-in-a-mist can thrive and bloom again.

Meanwhile, as Buldrini imagines the landscapes Aldrovandi once trod, Timothy Walker, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and Caroline Ummenhofer, an associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, are out at sea centuries ago, or, at least, recording what it was like through reading historic whaling ship logbooks housed at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts. The museum has the world’s largest collection of whaling logbooks, with over 2,500 of them, some dating back to 1668. Most every seagoing vessel at that time kept a logbook, in essence, a journal or diary of the ship, highlighting the day-to-day life on the ocean. These include copious notes on wind speeds and precipitation. 

Walker and Ummenhofer, who have been working on the project since 2019, can take that handwritten data and create climate models to see shifting weather patterns over the years. “Being able to put recent trends into a long-term context, as we are able to do with the whaling records, is really important to help with decadal predictions and assess potential risk management,” Ummenhofer said.

Since the old whaling days, there have been warming oceans, melting ice sheets on Greenland, shifting weather patterns, and more frequent intense droughts and floods. One thing that Ummenhofer and Walker discovered was that the “roaring 40s”—the strong westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere between latitudes of 40° and 50° south—could now be called the “roaring 50s,” in that the wind has made a marked shift since the whaling days. As Ummenhofer explained, “This belt of strong westerly winds has moved further south.” This shift impacts those parts of the world that depend on wind to transport rain to the area. The land and people in that region who once had rain, have little. The people who once had little, have more. 

Photo by Susan Sholi

Researchers Timothy Walker and Caroline Ummenhofer have been exploring the whaling logbooks at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to compare historic weather patterns—particularly wind observations—to today. 

Ummenhofer added that reading the whaling journals can also help to look ahead to the future: “How can we better predict extreme events such as droughts and floods? By knowing how the ocean has affected climate, winds, rain-bearing weather systems, and more.”

And then there’s Kellen Calinger-Yoak, an associate professor of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at the Ohio State University, who has been wandering under red maple trees that weren’t there until recently and comparing this ecology to the reports of Thomas Mikesell, a farmer who lived in Wauseon, Ohio, from 1883 to 1912. “If you go out into an Ohio forest now, red maples are everywhere,” she said. “We’ve seen a big shift in the composition of our forests since Mikesell’s time.”

Mikesell kept meticulous notes that were compiled in a 1915 publication. “In all of his notes, he never mentions red maples, despite observing over forty woody species,” Calinger-Yoak said. 

The red maples are a symptom of predator declines. Without predators keeping the deer populations in check, red maples (food that deer don’t particularly like eating) flourish. This can make other native tree species and native herbaceous plants decline precipitously.

“Mikesell’s dataset is unique,” Calinger-Yoak said. “It gives a full picture of the beginning and end of the growing season. We know exactly how long trees were photosynthesizing more than a century ago.” As with each of these examples, the materials left behind by observers of nature in the past are allowing us to better understand how our world is changing and how we can prepare for this uncertain future.