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, 1975 to 1990, 2,275 specimens between them.
1 collectors and expeditions218 days in the field17,879 km between stops
5 journeys match
Johnson Randall
14 islands of Sri Lanka · Jan – Apr 1975
Johnson Randall across 14 islands of Sri Lanka, January – April 1975811 specimens · 56 stops · 88 days
Johnson Randall
20 islands · Aug – Nov 1987
Johnson Randall across 20 islands, August – November 1987700 specimens · 51 stops · 87 days · 9,036 km
Johnson Randall
11 islands · Aug – Oct 1988
Johnson Randall across 11 islands, August – October 1988522 specimens · 31 stops · 72 days · 5,627 km
Johnson Randall
20 islands of Indonesia · Sep – Nov 1986
Johnson Randall across 20 islands of Indonesia, September – November 1986166 specimens · 27 stops · 52 days · 1,511 km
Johnson Randall
12 islands of Indonesia · Oct – Nov 1990
Johnson Randall across 12 islands of Indonesia, October – November 199076 specimens · 15 stops · 28 days · 1,705 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.