Landscapes and Labscapes
Subtitle: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press
Published: November 1, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 341
ISBN-13: 9780226450094
Subjects: History of science; Life sciences: general issues; 20th century; c 1800 to c 1900; Biological Research; Ecology; Science; Science/Mathematics; USA; History; Life Sciences - Biology - General; Research & Methodology; Science / Methodology; Life Sciences - Ecology; Biology; Field work
First sentence: The border between laboratory and field science is one of the most important in the cultural geography of modern science.
Description: What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls?

In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.