40 YEARS OF DARWIN’S FINCH EVOLUTION ON THE GALÁPAGOS

Data rescue intern: Diego Beltran Segura

In the fall of 2024, I participated in a Data Rescue internship focused on cleaning and compiling 40 years of data collected by Peter and Rosemary Grant and their students. This dataset includes morphological and survival data for Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos Archipelago. My role involved organizing, correcting, and integrating several fragmented data tables, with the ultimate goal of publishing the full dataset for the first time.

The study began in 1973 when Peter and Rosemary Grant initiated one of the most iconic and successful long-term studies of evolution. Their primary study site—also the focus of this dataset—was Daphne Major, a small island (0.34 km²) located 8 km north of Santa Cruz Island. Over four decades (1973–2012), the Grants and their research team recorded detailed morphological and survival data for four finch species inhabiting Daphne: The Small Ground Finch (Geospiza fuliginosa), Medium Ground Finch (G. fortis), Large Ground Finch (G. magnirostris), and Cactus Finch (G. scandens). The overarching aim was to observe evolution in real time by tracking changes in finch morphology driven by natural selection and hybridization.
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During my internship, I developed a suite of R scripts to detect errors and duplicates, consolidate multiple data sources into a unified structure, and enhance data accessibility. Working with this historic dataset has deepened my appreciation for the importance of data organization early in the research process—an insight I will carry forward in my own work by prioritizing transparency, careful documentation, and reproducibility.