The promises and challenges of archiving insect behavior and natural history in a changing world.

Insect behavioral ecologists are not routinely archiving their behavioral media files and natural history observations. This is especially problematic because most behaviors are not preserved by the physical specimens stored in typical natural history collections. Improving the reporting and archiving of insect behavior and natural history data holds the promise of allowing scientists to track real-time responses of animals to global change and will preserve aspects of natural history that might otherwise be lost due to extinctions. Here we argue that behavioral ecologists should work to preserve and archive raw media files and field notes related to behavior and natural history of their study organisms. One major mechanism to incentivize archiving of such data would be for journals to develop policies for archiving of natural history data that is the focus of the paper or ancillary information collected about study subjects. Buy in from researchers, journals, and funding agencies will be needed to make substantial changes in data archiving.