Debiasing Collection in Field Biology

Biological fieldwork is often esoteric. Decisions about where studies are performed, why certain specimens are collected or ignored, and how participation in research is distributed are often considered background for research. However, this ‘background’ is central to understanding fieldwork and biodiversity collections. Some of these considerations fall cleanly into the “happenstance” category, leading to what Adrian Currie calls “secret epistemologies.” Other biasing factors are more systematic. For example, field scientists often collect from the same sites on a year-by-year basis, but inferences drawn from this small pool of sites might still be presented as suggesting a more substantive conclusion. Similarly, permitting and accessibility concerns might incentivize researchers to avoid Tribal or Indigenous land, land under active use, such as ranches, farms, and landfills, and land with restricted access, such as military bases. This introduces both epistemic and ethical biases, such as the exclusion of biota important to vulnerable Indigenous and local communities. We argue that field collection is an expert craft, and correcting its biases requires active debiasing on the part of its expert practitioners. Furthermore, we argue that fieldwork is prospective and curatorial: the field researcher makes expert decisions in the field, such as where transects will be, but also makes judgments about what to collect against a constellation of reasons, not all of which are purely epistemic.