Journeys
The expeditions, reassembled
Every dated label is a diary entry. Read a collector’s labels in order and the voyage comes back: the islands in sequence, the days at each, the specimens from every stop. 3 journeys so far, 1963 to 1968, 997 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions152 days in the field65,130 km between stops659 photographed specimens
3 journeys match
Grady L. Webster
10 islands · Jun – Sep 1968
Grady L. Webster across 10 islands, June – September 1968510 specimens · 60 stops · 111 days · 38,525 km
Richard Hildreth
6 islands · Jul – Sep 1968
Richard Hildreth across 6 islands, July – September 1968322 specimens · 44 stops · 75 days · 8,666 km
H.U. Stauffer
10 islands · Dec 1963 – Apr 1964
H.U. Stauffer across 10 islands, December 1963 – April 1964165 specimens · 43 stops · 140 days · 17,939 km
How a journey is found
Every specimen with a full date (year, month and day; a bare “1 January” is treated as a missing day) and a named collector is a diary entry. For each collector the days are read in order, each day given the place most of its labels name. The place where a collector spent more than forty percent of their days, and at least sixty of them, is home: days there are left out.
A gap of more than 21 days between collecting days ends one journey and begins the next. A journey must run five to four hundred days, hold at least forty specimens and touch at least two places. Within it, consecutive days inside the same or a neighbouring tenth-of-a-degree cell (about eleven kilometres) are one stop; the stop’s point is the mean of its labels’ coordinates, or the island’s centre when none carry any.
Companions are collectors whose own labels put them in the same cell on the same days. Staff can name a journey, write about it, feature it or hide it; those words survive every rebuild. Everything else is read off the specimens and rebuilt by harvest.mjs expeditions as the records improve.