This article examines how geologists, botanists, and ecologists used pollen as a proxy for past climates in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on a particular challenge of measuring climate with pollen: pollen’s mobility. As scientists came to learn, pollen from some vegetation is more mobile than others. Pollen’s differential mobility challenged regional climatic conclusions because of the potential mixing of pollen from various locations. To minimize the effects of this problem, pollen analysts sought to decrease the (...) noise produced by highly local or foreign pollen. Yet, many ground-truthing and calibration methods were not available to pollen analysts because of the temporal separation between the observer and the object of interest. Instead, pollen analysts had to make spatial meaning out of fossil pollen using empirical studies of modern pollen, inferences from macrofossils and successional history, and applying statistical theories to fossil pollen data. Many of these corrections factors relied on pollen analysts’ knowledge of place, including elements like the location’s topography, prevailing winds, and plant cover. These elements were a natural part of vegetation-pollen-climate interactions. Scientists needed to account for them to turn pollen into a proxy for climate. Pollen’s movement was equally natural, but scientists decided to eliminate some pollen to augment the regional climate signal. These selective eliminations of place suggest that not all elements of place are equally important. Scientists had to omit some elements of place to make sense of the complexities of the natural world. (shrink)

Intense interspecies engagements are central to the work of ecologists, as they seek to understand our rapidly changing world. To explore researcher-bird engagements in ecological fieldwork, we use a lens of care. Taking as a starting point the widely shared photos of bird-in-the-hand that portray situations where individual birds become sources of data about populations, we show the significance of complex care work in ethically and epistemically loaded moments. Crucial knowledge about survival, biodiversity loss and animal welfare emerges at the (...) intersection of multispecies care for individuals, for populations and for knowledge infrastructures. We put forth the concept of intermittent care to explain the changing concerns for individual birds here-and-now or for populations of the future. Attention to care therefore helps unravel how ecological knowing depends on entanglements between humans, nature, and technologies that take shape through a constant negotiation of different strands and matters of multispecies care. (shrink)

While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation (...) to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised. (shrink)