Species Occurrence Data from the Journals of William Brewster, 1886-1894

Citation

Description

Collection Summary: Journals in which Brewster recorded observations of birds, their habitats and seasonal behavior, while traveling through New England and other areas of the United States.

Collector History Note: William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, and the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He amassed a collection of over forty thousand specimens of birds, nests, and eggs, one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Brewster curated the bird collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) from 1885 until his death in 1919 at which time his personal collection was gifted to the Museum. Brewster conducted ornithological expeditions to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Colorado, West Virginia and North Carolina mountains, South Carolina and Georgia lowlands, Florida and to Trinidad. He served as Curator of mammals and birds, Boston Society of Natural History, from 1880 to 1887; Curator of mammals and birds, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, from 1885 to 1900. For additional biographical information see: Bird-Lore (1919) 21, pp. 277-286.

Collector ID: https://bionomia.net/Q2119625

Citations:

deVeer, J. (n.d.). William Brewster - Collection overview. Harvard CURIOSity Digital Collections. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy

William Brewster Papers. (n.d.). Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers

Purpose

As the urgency to address the climate crisis intensifies, the availability of accurate and comprehensive biodiversity data has become crucial for informing climate change studies, tracking key environmental indicators, and building global biodiversity monitoring platforms. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) plays a vital role in the core biodiversity infrastructure, housing over 60 million pages of digitized literature about life on Earth. Recognizing the value of over 500 years of data in BHL, a global network of BHL staff is working to establish a scalable data pipeline to provide actionable occurrence data from BHL’s vast and diverse collections of primary source materials such as diaries, journals, correspondence, and photographs. See: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112436 for more information.

Additional info

Taxonomic Coverages

Geographic Coverages

Bibliographic Citations

1. William Brewster Papers. (n.d.). Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers - https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/WilliamBrewsterPapers
2. deVeer, J. (n.d.). William Brewster - Collection overview. Harvard CURIOSity Digital Collections. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy - https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/william-brewster-an-ornithologists-legacy
3. Dearborn, J., Lichtenberg, M., Richard, J. M., deVeer, J., Trizna, M., & Mika, K. (2023). Unearthing the Past for a Sustainable Future: Extracting and transforming data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library for climate action. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 7. - https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112436