In a recent paper published in The American Naturalist, KLI alumni Hari Sridhar and Joyshree Chanam, along with Priyanka Hariharan, contribute to the ongoing debate over the place of natural history in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB). While concerns have often focused on whether natural history (the direct observation of organisms in their environments) is declining, the authors argue that this debate overlooks an important but largely invisible dimension: natural history that remains hidden because it is typically written out of published papers. Drawing on a collection of oral history interviews with authors of influential EEB papers conducted as part of the Reflections on Papers Past project (https://reflectionsonpaperspast.com/), the study identifies three key roles of hidden natural history in scientific practice. First, it serves as a spark, motivating new research questions and hypotheses. Second, it provides a scaffold, in the form of expertise that guides the design and conduct of studies. Finally, it becomes the substrate for new research when pre-existing natural history information is repurposed as datasets. By revealing these often-unacknowledged contributions, the authors argue that natural history continues to play a fundamental epistemic role in the background of studies that, on the surface, seem to contain no natural history. Given this, the paper explores the likely consequences of a decline of hidden natural history on knowledge creation in EEB.

Publication:

Hari Sridhar, Joyshree Chanam, and Priyanka Hariharan (2026) Spark, Scaffold, Substrate: The Multiple Hidden Roles of Natural History in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The American Naturalist, Vol. 208, No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1086/741683