Clare Island Survey

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The Clare Island Survey was a multidisciplinary (zoological, botanical, archaeological, and geological) survey of Clare Island, off the west coast of Ireland.

The survey, which followed a similar survey of Lambay Island in 1905 and 1906, was proposed by Robert Lloyd Praeger and in April 1908 a committee was formed to recruit and organise the work of over one hundred scientists from Ireland, England Denmark, Germany and Switzerland and the data collected during three years of field work on the island (1909-1911). The committee members were Robert Lloyd Praeger, Robert Francis Scharff, Richard Manliffe Barrington, Grenville Cole, Nathaniel Colgan and Henry William Lett.

The bulk of the work is concerned with systematic zoology and botany but paid special attention to questions of geographical distribution, dispersal, and ecology and covered antiquities, place-names, family names, geology, climatology, agriculture and meteorology.

The results were published both as A Biological Survey of Clare Island in the County of Mayo, Ireland and of the Adjoining District. Parts 1-68 (part 8 was never published) Dublin Hodges, Figgis, & Co., Ltd., for the Royal Irish Academy, 1911-1915.:The sections are Introduction, Archaeology, Irish Names, Agriculture, Climatology, Geology, Botany, Zoology and as separate parts in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. [1]

The parts are:

Nonpublishing participants John Adams (naturalist) (Marine algae); Edward Alexander Newell Arber (Geology); James Bayley Butler (Protozoa); Frederik Børgesen (Marine algae); George W. Chaster (Mollusca); Grenville Cole (Geology), George Fogerty (Archaeology); Thomas Greer (Lepidoptera); David Thomas Gwynne-Vaughan (botany); Arthur William Hill (Botany); John De Witt Hinch (Glacial geology); Stanley Wells Kemp (marine dredging); Matilda Cullen Knowles (lichens, flowering plants, peat deposits); David McArdle (Mosses and hepatics); James Napier Milne (insects); Charles Joseph Patten (birds); Eugène Penard (rhizopods); Walter Mead Rankin (Crustacea and Decapoda); Colin M. Selbie (marine dredging and Crustacea); Otto Stapf (botany); Isaac Swain (geology)

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References

  1. ↑ Collins, Timothy (1999). "The Clare Island Survey of 1909-1911: participants, papers and progress". In Mac Carthaigh, Criostoir; Whelan, Kevin (eds.). New Survey of Clare Island: History and Cultural Landscape. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. pp. 1–40. ISBN   1874045712.

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