New Biodiversity Data using Old Fashioned Botanical Letters

Data Rescue Intern: Philippa Stone

Over the winter of 2025/2026, I completed the data rescue internship, “New Biodiversity Data using Old Fashioned Botanical Letters,” with Linda Jennings at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. 
 
John W. Eastham (1878-1968), was one of the most prolific of the early plant collectors in British Columbia. Eastham donated his specimen collection to the herbarium at UBC after his retirement as British Columbia’s Plant Pathologist (1914 -1947). The herbarium also holds a collection of his letters that contain valuable information about herbarium specimens and the state of taxonomy at the time of their writing, but the letters are fragile and some are beginning to disintegrate.

A herbarium specimen of Vaccinium ovatum collected on Lasqueti Island by Eastham in 1939 (V016477)

The second page of a letter from JW Eastham to Winifred Hardy, a botanist at the Royal British Columbia Museum, describing the population of Vaccinium ovatum on Lasqueti Island.

I worked with an undergraduate student, Seth Perez, to digitize the letters. We found that Eastham’s correspondence collection contained over 800 letters, comprising over 1300 individual pages of text. Of the 68 individuals that we have records of Eastham corresponding with, most were botanists, including eminent names such as Erling Porsild, David Keck, and Mary Bowerman. Interestingly we can also see that Eastham was in correspondence with individuals from many different backgrounds, including a cattle rancher, medicinal herb salesman, railway worker, and even someone asking about a potential cure for arthritis! Despite the fact that Eastham emigrated to Canada from Scotland as an adult, the records at UBC show that he corresponded exclusively with North Americans.
 
The vast majority of the letters were typewritten, and but some were written by hand. It could be challenging to decipher the 1940s cursive style handwriting, but being able to cross reference with resources, such as British Columbia Place Names, was at times a great help. I transcribed the handwritten letters myself, but the typewritten letters were processed automatically. Paul Bucci, the Informatics Curator at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, wrote a pipeline that used Tesseract for optical character recognition to transcribe the typewritten letters.
 
Linking up the letters to the physical herbarium specimens is an ongoing process, but interesting findings have already been uncovered. Most notably I’ve found correspondence about one species endemic to Vancouver Island that we now know was new to science at the time, and which I was able to link back to a herbarium specimen held at UBC. Once the project is complete, the letters will be linked to the relevant herbarium specimens with Specify, the collections management software used by the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, and then uploaded to GBIF.
 
Through this internship I was able to improve my technical skills in data management, data handling, and scripting. I also honed my historical research skills by spending some time in the BC Archives and Vancouver Archives to find more information about Eastham and his work. I also learned a lot about social history and World War II by reading his letters. Eastham’s correspondence collection was a fascinating dataset to work with, and completely different to any type of research I had been involved with before. 

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