About

Functional resurveys: Repeating historical experiments or otherwise quantifying changes in organism function through time.

Heterogeneity and seeming unpredictability in responses to environmental change is driving a push to understand the underlying organismal mechanisms. The 2024 Vice Presidential Symposium of the American Society of Naturalists aimed to catalyze a promising and underutilized approach to extend understanding: repeating historical experiments or otherwise quantifying organism function through time. Many physiological, behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary experiments or observations reported in journal articles and elsewhere offer the potential for repeating the data collection to detect responses to environmental change.

Types of functional resurvey approaches include:

• resurrection of dormant organisms
• repeating physiological measurements
• repeating behavioral experiments or observations
• repeating selection and quantitative genetic experiments
• repeating measurement of ecosystem function and composition

This website highlights functional resurvey projects coordinated by the research group led by Lauren Buckley in the Biology Department at the University of Washington. Collaborators are crucial to each resurvey project so we have created an independent website. Related computational and visualization tools to translate environmental change into organismal responses are available on the TrEnCh project website.

Thanks for your interest in functional resurveys.