David Gregg is the director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey (RINHS). David first discovered his love for natural history as an insect aficionado, then as an archeologist and anthropologist, and later as a museum director and curator. He joined RINHS as a member in 2000 and became director in 2004. He manages the database and staff of RINHS, organizes partnerships and networks, and plans projects and events. Outside of work, David builds boats, cares for a small farm in Wakefield, Rhode Island, and volunteers on land stewardship projects on Cape Cod.
I grew up in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. We lived on the outskirts of Woods Hole, and all my friends’ fathers worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution or Marine Biological Laboratory. I always joke that it wasn’t, “Do you want to be a scientist when you grow up?” but, “What kind of scientist are you going to be when you grow up?” I was really interested in insects. I remember one day I came back from sailing class and left my wet sneakers on the lawn and went in to eat lunch. When I came out, there was a tiger swallowtail sitting on my sneakers, probably drinking the salt water off them. And I thought that was really cool, and it was sort of love at first sight.
I started collecting butterflies. One Halloween I was a mad scientist, so of course I had a butterfly net. I caught butterflies with that costume cheesecloth butterfly net for a while. But pretty quickly I ran out of new butterfly species to catch. Cape Cod has sort of a depauperate insect fauna in many ways. It’s got some particularly rare species because it has unique coastal habitats, but in terms of total diversity, it is pretty low. I felt sort of hard done by that, like, “Oh man, of course my parents would live in a place where there’s no fritillaries!” But I had a friend who was into moths, so after I had caught all the butterflies, I started collecting those. I got all the pretty, colorful moths, and then I got to the point where they were all the same color – all brown and indistinguishable. I had been reading about beetles and thought they’d be more interesting, so I moved on to beetles. I was terribly misinformed because beetles are way worse than moths. I mean, after you get the first eight beetle species, the rest of them are brown and mostly tiny.
I took classes at Woods Hole Children’s School of Science and then was a teacher’s assistant there. I went to Colgate University in 1982 to study entomology. Little did I know that most entomologists at that time dealt with agriculture and pesticides. It just didn’t interest me that much, so I switched part way through sophomore year to an archeology major, and then I went on to get my PhD in anthropology from Brown University and finished in 2000. I did a lot of museum work, and after grad school went into non-profit work.
I became a member of the RINHS and attended the first Rhode Island BioBlitz in 2000. They had advertised in the paper looking for people who were interested in any kind of natural history to come to Roger Williams Park in Providence and help find as many species as possible in 24 hours. I thought it sounded pretty cool. I joined the survey and then a year later I joined the board. I did that for two years until the directorship opened up.
I’m going on 21 years with RINHS now. We’re the state’s natural heritage data center. In many states, that’s within a state agency, but in Rhode Island it’s not; we’re a non-profit. We manage the database of all the rare species locations and use that information to help land trusts, the state, and other organizations make management decisions. Our role is providing information and technical assistance. This covers things from how to implement the state wildlife action plan to how to carry out forest health monitoring. We can help organizations interpret information and then create protocols or plans from it, whether it’s a town planner or a volunteer on the zoning board or a steward at a land trust. One of our bigger projects is developing wetland assessment methods for the state – figuring out how to rapidly and repeatably assess the condition of freshwater and saltwater wetlands across the state.
When I started, we had a whole bunch of money – RINHS had just been separated out from The Nature Conservancy, and they gave some money to get us started. It ran out quickly and within a year we needed to find new funding sources and get more billable to survive. We really scrambled to find a niche and diversify funding. We’re a little bit still like that, because we don’t have baseline funding, but we do have 400 members, which has been key to our survival. We try to stay very visible, whether that’s presenting at conferences or it’s building networks. The idea is to be at things where I can show what the survey has to offer in terms of technical expertise or connections to other people. It’s usually walking back to the car after the meeting when somebody says, “Hey, we’ve got this project. Can you help us?”
We’re a part of the Rhode Island Woodland Partnership, which includes loggers and conservationists, and land trusts and state managers. We meet once a month, and we invite somebody to speak about the work they’re doing. We also started the Rhode Island Plant Insect Community Network; we have members inventorying bees, propagating native plants, and counting birds. We’re trying to draw attention to how all these things are connected, to learn what each other are doing, and support and problem solve together.
We have a database for tracking species, and we’re developing a new version that will be able to track not only rare species, but any species of interest – invasives or indicator species, or anything of research interest. We compile a lot of inventories and data generated by other projects that contain a lot of biodiversity data. Otherwise, a lot of the time, that information doesn’t go anywhere – a project report just goes on a shelf. We want to create a repository for this kind of information, indexed so people can find it. When you start these things, you never know what it might be used for, but once it contains enough information, spread over space and over time, it becomes super useful.
Right now, we still spend a lot of time scrambling for money. That makes it hard to be strategic because I can’t think, “Is this a project that will take us somewhere we want to go long-term?” Instead, I have to find a project that will pay the bills on Friday. There’s a lot more that we’d like to do, but we don’t have the time or resources. It would be really helpful if we had a state botanist. There are essentially no botanists employed in Rhode Island outside academia. Our strategic plan identifies creating a state botanist position as a top goal. At RINHS, it’s just me and Kira Stillwell, the program manager, who are full time, so that makes it hard to both manage the organization and deliver on the mission. I’d really like to do a new inventory of the vascular flora of Rhode Island. There was one in the 1950s, and then another in the ’90s, so I think we’re due for one now. The picture that we could draw across those three studies would be very informative.
The best part for me is the people: it’s so cool to see all the different things that bring people to the natural world. It’s not just taxonomists; we have artists and educators, and people that care about museums or outreach. Then of course there’s people into specific types of organisms, such as turtles, or insects, or plants. When I think about natural history, it’s really about knowing a place and all the interesting and useful information about that place, and there are so many ways to approach that. Science is one of them, but art is, too. During our BioBlitz, we actually have art teams, and then we have a show at our office. Everyone’s got some insight or a new way of seeing a place – and all of it adds something to the big picture that we’re working on.