Surveying wildlife along Lewis and Clark's route, 220 years later
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What historical insights do Lewis and Clark's wildlife observations provide?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. In the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark loaded up their camping gear and journals and headed west to the Pacific, recording what they saw along the way. The expedition, partly about natural history, partly about future colonization, returned with a record of biodiversity in the early 1800s in the now United States. 200 and some years later, a new expedition is headed west to find out how wildlife populations have changed over the centuries. Dr. Roland Kayes and his team are traveling the same route using camera traps and enlisting local scientists to document the wildlife along the way. Roland Kayes is the head of the Biodiversity Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and he's on the line to give us an update about his trip and what they're finding.
Hey, Roland, welcome to Science Friday.
Hey, great. Thanks for having me.
Where are we finding you today?
Right now, I'm basically in a van down by the river. We're on the Missouri River, which is most of the route that we're following. We're presently at a dam, Fort Peck Dam in Montana.
What are the days like? What are you doing all day?
Well, we are driving and kayaking along the Missouri River. So we're hitting some of the more significant, more interesting, more beautiful parts of the river in canoes and kayaks, and otherwise we're driving. And we're obviously looking for wildlife ourselves, but we're also collaborating with a team of scientists, over 100 scientists across the country who are running camera traps. And these cameras let us document in a systematic way what animals are living all along the route today.
What are the big questions that you're trying to answer?
Well, the big question is, is how is wildlife doing today? And and then comparing that against what Lewis and Clark observed. So they were meticulously writing down in their journals all the animals that they saw, many of which they were shooting and eating along the route. We're not shooting and eating animals, but we are getting them on camera and we're able to compare. You know, how wildlife has changed really over the 250 years, right? We're up to our country's 250th birthday. And so this is kind of a long-term reflection of the state of wildlife.
How is the modern expedition tracking wildlife along the Missouri River?
What about the science of this? Is it scientifically meaningful if you happen to see the same animals that Lewis and Clark did 200 years ago?
Well, sure. So we're not the first ones to look at wildlife in North America since Lewis and Clark, right? There's a long, rich history of that. So what we're doing is using this as a time point to get a really good systematic survey across this region with the camera traps. And so that's one that we can use to compare from one region to another and from one year to another, you know, in recent time with camera traps. Lewis and Clark didn't have camera traps. So, you know, the comparison with what they saw... isn't going to be, you know, super statistically robust. But there are some big obvious patterns that we can see, you know, not only from the Lewis and Clark time point to today, but, you know, over the last few decades, the last few centuries.
And so we're really trying to tell some of those stories of how the wildlife's doing in our country and what have we done to help them and what have we done to hurt them? And what can we do sort of moving forward to maintain sustainable, healthy wildlife populations?
What are you seeing so far? I mean, have you seen anything unexpected? Have there been surprises?
Well, so a lot of, when you look at the big arc of wildlife, a lot of what we see today is good news. A lot of the animals that we see today are doing way better than they were a hundred years ago. We started in Pittsburgh where Lewis started his journey. And by the time he was leaving Pittsburgh, a lot of the big animals had already been shot out. And he observed flocks of passenger pigeon and not that long afterwards, those birds were shot out and they went extinct. He didn't even observe Sandhill Crane there.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What historical insights do Lewis and Clark's wildlife observations provide?
0:03–2:20
2
How is the modern expedition tracking wildlife along the Missouri River?
2:20–7:52
3
What are the primary questions being addressed by the wildlife survey team?
7:52–14:48
4
What surprising wildlife changes have been observed since Lewis and Clark's time?
14:48–18:01
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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