A Return to the MVZ 1914-1920 Yosemite Transect

Between 1911 and 1919, Joseph Grinnell, Tracy Storer, and their colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) surveyed the terrestrial vertebrates along a transect that stretched from the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, through Yosemite National Park, to the area around Mono Lake. These surveys were part of a larger study of the fauna of California that Grinnell and his colleagues conducted for much of the first half of the twentieth century. The main emphasis of these studies was to characterize the fauna of California, as it existed at that time. But Grinnell also had the foresight to realize that these studies could serve as important baselines against which future studies could be compared in order to measure faunal change over time. Grinnell encouraged future scientists to make these comparisons. To that end, he and his