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. 5 journeys so far, 1983 to 1988, 1,894 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions97 days in the field44,221 km between stops465 photographed specimens
5 journeys match
Jacques Florence
8 islands of French Polynesia · Jun – Aug 1988
Jacques Florence across 8 islands of French Polynesia, June – August 1988627 specimens · 15 stops · 60 days · 8,617 km
Warren L. Wagner Jr.
7 islands · Jun – Aug 1988
Warren L. Wagner Jr. across 7 islands, June – August 1988536 specimens · 19 stops · 59 days · 10,062 km
David H. Lorence
6 islands · Jun – Aug 1988
David H. Lorence across 6 islands, June – August 1988538 specimens · 18 stops · 37 days · 9,578 km
Jacques Florence
4 islands of French Polynesia · Feb – Mar 1986
Jacques Florence across 4 islands of French Polynesia, February – March 1986133 specimens · 7 stops · 27 days · 15,964 km
L. Wester
3 islands · 1–22 Aug 1983
L. Wester in Washington (=Teraina), Fanning (=Tabuaeran) and Ua Huka, 1–22 August 198360 specimens · 4 stops · 22 days
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.