Illuminating the Past: U-M Biological Station is Digitizing Over a Century of Field Research Data

“I enjoy uncovering and preserving the value and story within each item,” Tallant said. “Otherwise, what a waste.”

The husband and father of three brings his personal passion to his professional world.

For 12 years, Tallant has served as the data manager at the University of Michigan Biological Station, a historic source of information about how ecology in northern Michigan has changed over the last century.

The research and teaching campus founded in 1909 nestled along Douglas Lake amid more than 10,000-forested acres is home to dark data stored away in file cabinets and closets in Stockard Lakeside Laboratory to the equivalent of a 120-foot-tall stack of paper encompassing research across different fields of study.

Tallant and his team are working to preserve UMBS’s historical archives and make them accessible for generations of future researchers.

"The role of field stations in science is that they’re locations with detailed information about places that we can compare to other places,” Tallant said.

“Being a station with 117 years of history, the archival documentation and sharing of historical data is invaluable for looking at long-term trends in the populations of regional organisms, in how the world is changing around us, and how it might not actually be changing."

The effort also involves more than a century of student papers. In the days before digital — way back at the turn of last century — students wrote up their summer experiments by hand, stapled the reports, and filed them in drawers at the field station.

Data like this is often called “dark data” — unused data, or, as Tallant calls it, “stuff that lives in file cabinets that nobody knows about. It’s literally dark because no one is there shining a light on it.”

Until now.

The five-year strategic plan that UMBS launched at the start of 2025 made digitizing and sharing historical UMBS data a priority. Specifically, the plan set a goal to increase publicly available datasets by 45% across new and historic UMBS data.

“I am excited to bring our dark data to light,” said Dr. Aimée Classen, director of the U-M Biological Station. “Over 100 years of accumulated information enables our researchers and students to hit the ground running and ask unique questions that they couldn’t ask in places that don’t have this sort of deep, long-term understanding of ecosystems. It’s also a fantastic resource for researchers in other places who want to know if the patterns they are seeing at their field site are the same that we see in northern Michigan.”

Along with Tallant, U-M students Lena Reeves and Malachi Cassels worked throughout the spring and summer rescuing old reports from obscurity.

While relocating and organizing file cabinets, Tallant stumbled upon a more than 100-year-old map of what’s known as Sedge Point in Douglas Lake’s North Fishtail Bay, which proved particularly exciting.

The in-depth documentation, detailed surveys and numerous photos of the landscape from a UMBS class in 1922 was used by the 2025 Field Botany class to investigate how plant communities have changed over the past century at that exact site.

In June the class hauled out vasculums, plant presses and field guides and used iNaturalist to create a floristic inventory of Sedge Point.

Among the many comparisons, they found that the open dune habitats transformed into dense woody vegetation, evidenced by landscape surveys, floristic lists and extensive photo documentation.

This transition was accompanied by the loss of dune specialist species.

The detailed surveys and highly accurate mapping by earlier courses could be compared with contemporary satellite imagery to see the fine-scale changes to the shoreline. (Read the full report.)

“The difference is amazing,” said Dr. Susan Fawcett, a research botanist and UMBS course instructor. “Thanks to this map, the historical photographs and herbarium specimens, my botany students not only walked in the footsteps of a previous class, they advanced their work. That’s the beauty of the University of Michigan Biological Station, which has such a rich history. You can track change over a long period of time.”

"It was just sort of serendipitous," Tallant said.

Lena Reeves, a sophomore at U-M, served as a data digitization technician at UMBS during the 2025 field season. She spent her time at the Pellston campus uploading reports like the 1922 Sedge Point file to data repositories that store the information online to be accessed by researchers around the world.

"I think not a lot of people know about the data and the archives we have at UMBS, but data's been collected here for such a long time,” Reeves said. “I'm happy we're getting the chance to share it with people."

Tallant’s team has inventoried and digitized about a third of the archived material, with continued efforts to digitize the rest.