Counting marmots…
This is one of 12 scenarios the Centennial Campaign 2027 explores. It is an AI-generated planning artifact, not a forecast or an RMBL institutional commitment. The contingencies it depends on are named in its plausibility-caveats and (where applicable) upside or downside conditions sections. See the browse page for the full set, including the alternative scenarios.
Centennial Records and Data assumes the campaign comes in modest, and that RMBL responds with a focused two-part bet: protect the basin's longest records, and grow a small data team that can finally read those records at scales prior generations could not attempt. The marmot study passes its seventy-fifth year in this period. The long meadow phenology series and snowmelt-driven plant work continue without lapse. Alongside that stewardship, RMBL adds a few data scientists and archivists, digitizes a century of field notebooks and plot records, and builds the tools to make them machine-readable. About two-thirds of the work is continuity; the rest is the digital and analytical capacity that turns archival depth into living research. The scenario forgoes new atmospheric instrumentation, broad community partnership programs, and large financial reserves. It asks donors and the institution to believe that a narrow, well-chosen pair of investments at the campaign floor can matter more than a wider spread.
---
The campaign comes in modest, but RMBL bets that growing in-house data-science capacity is the highest-leverage thing a small budget can do alongside continuity. The marmot, meadow, and snowmelt records are protected; the digitization and AI work makes them newly readable. The scenario tests whether a focused two-frontier bet at floor magnitude can be more impactful than spreading thinly across more.
This scenario assumes the Centennial Campaign comes in modest. Federal science funding stays tight through the horizon. The donor base supports stewardship but does not stretch to a broad expansion. RMBL responds by narrowing rather than spreading: two frontiers, chosen because they reinforce each other, funded at the campaign floor.
The first is the basin's longest records. The marmot study at Gothic now in its eighth decade passes 75 years during the horizon. The long meadow phenology series, the snowmelt-driven plant work, and the pollinator censuses are all entering decades where a single lapse in observation would be irreparable. The campaign protects them — the protocols, the plot markers, the archival systems, the technical staff who support the guest scientists doing the work.
The second is a small data team. RMBL adds a few people — data scientists, an archivist, AI-tool capacity — to the existing technical core. Their job is to make a century of basin science readable. Field notebooks come off shelves and into databases. Hand-written census sheets become searchable. The tools they build let guest scientists ask questions of the archive that the original observers could not have framed.
The bet is that these two investments compound. Protected records are the raw material; the data team is what turns archival depth into living research. Neither would be as valuable alone. At the campaign floor, doing both at modest scale is what the scenario claims is possible.
The campaign closes in this phase at the campaign floor. RMBL leadership and the board commit to the two-frontier focus and accept what is not funded. The first new data-team hires arrive — a data scientist and an archivist join the existing technical core by 2028. The archivist begins the long work of digitizing field notebooks, starting with the marmot demographic record and the meadow phenology series. The data scientist works alongside guest scientists to build search and analysis tools on top of the Knowledge Commons platform. On the records side, observer succession in the marmot study moves through a planned transition as long-serving field workers hand off to the next generation. Protocols are documented in greater detail than ever before, partly because the digitization work surfaces gaps. The community of guest scientists notices the data tools first; the broader research community notices the protected continuity. By 2030, the basic shape of the bet is visible: small team, large archive, intact records.
The digitization work crosses a threshold. By 2032, the marmot record, the meadow phenology series, and the long pollinator censuses are all available as structured, searchable data. The data team grows by one or two more positions — an AI-tools specialist joins, and the team begins partnering with guest scientists on retrospective syntheses that would not have been possible before. The marmot study passes its seventy-fifth year in this phase. The seventy-fifth-year milestone is marked quietly — a workshop, a synthesis paper drawing on the now-digitized record, attention from regional press. Guest scientists begin using the archive in new ways: a researcher asks how floral traits have shifted across fifty years of meadow records; another links the methylation-clock work to the now-digitized demographic record. RMBL's role shifts subtly. The institution is no longer only a place where field work happens; it is also a place where a century of accumulated field work can be read at scale. The data team is small — five or six people by 2035 — but their leverage is large.
The compounding effect of the two-frontier bet becomes visible by the end of the horizon. The records are intact. The archive is digital, structured, and increasingly cross-linked. The data team has matured into a stable group whose work attracts external grants on its own terms — the same flywheel pattern that built the Knowledge Commons in the prior decade, now operating around the archive and the synthesis tools. Guest-scientist publications drawing on the digitized records appear regularly; a noticeable share name RMBL data-team members as collaborators. The constraints of the modest campaign are also visible. RMBL has no in-town laboratory space. Community partnerships remain informal. The institution carries less buffer than it would prefer against funding shocks. A federal-funding shock in this phase would be felt sharply, because the campaign did not build the reserves to absorb one. The scenario ends with a question: was the narrow bet right? On the evidence inside the horizon, the records and the readable archive are the lasting things. Whether the institution could have done more with a wider scope is unprovable.
If you work on phenology, pollination, demography, or any line of inquiry that depends on the basin's long records, this scenario is the one that makes your work easier through the period. The records you rely on stay intact. The archives you might once have visited in person become searchable from your desk. The data team at RMBL will partner with you on retrospective syntheses, help you cross-reference your observations against decades of prior work, and build tools that match the questions you bring. If your work depends on atmospheric instrumentation, new mechanistic experiments, or community partnerships, this scenario offers less — those threads continue through whatever you and your home institution can sustain on your own. The trade is sharp and visible. What the scenario gives you is a century of basin science you can actually read.
RMBL through this period stays small, focused, and quiet. The Gothic site looks much as it does now. The technical core grows by four or five people — data scientists, an archivist, an AI-tools specialist — and that growth is the most visible change. The data team becomes a recognizable part of the institution, the way the GIS and instrumentation staff are now. Day-to-day work in summer feels familiar: guest scientists arrive, fieldwork happens, the records continue. What changes is what happens around the records the rest of the year. Archives that lived in file cabinets are increasingly online. Synthesis papers drawing on the digitized record appear regularly in journals. The institution is doing less than a wider campaign would have funded, and the constraints show. But the work it does is durable and visibly its own.
Your contribution joins an effort to protect a century of basin records and to make them readable for the next century of researchers. The marmot study passes its seventy-fifth year inside this period. The long meadow and pollinator records continue without lapse. A small data team at RMBL turns hand-written notebooks and plot sheets into a structured archive that scientists can search and analyze in ways the original observers could not have imagined. The work is unglamorous — digitization, protocol stewardship, software tools, the slow building of a small team. It is also the kind of work that compounds quietly across decades. The scenario asks you to value durability over expansion, and to be part of the conditions under which a focused, modest investment can matter more than a broader one.
The scenario assumes the campaign reaches the campaign floor rather than falling short of it. A campaign that closes well below this floor would not support the data team at the size the scenario describes; the digitization work would slow and some hires would not happen. The scenario also assumes that federal funding stays tight but does not collapse entirely. A sharp federal-funding shock would test the scenario hard because it does not build the financial reserves that would buffer one — this is the characteristic failure mode of the narrow bet. The scenario assumes AI tools mature steadily enough to support the synthesis work without overtaking the small team's distinctive contribution; if general-purpose models advance much faster, the team's work pivots toward curation and validation rather than methods development.
A structural blind spot: the scenario takes the donor base as supporting stewardship and modest in-house growth without testing whether donors will fund the unglamorous work of digitization and tool-building at the scale required. If donors prefer visible capital projects — buildings, instrumentation, community spaces — the campaign may close at this magnitude but with deliverables that do not match the scenario's strategic shape. A second blind spot: the scenario assumes observer succession in the long records proceeds without crisis, but the specific people who carry institutional knowledge of these records are not fungible. The scenario's continuity claim depends on succession planning the campaign supports but does not fully control.
---
Speculative. Lower resolution than the primary horizon.
Through the 2040s, the consequences of the narrow bet become clearer. The digitized archive matures into a resource that defines what basin science means to a generation of researchers who never visited Gothic in paper-and-pencil years. The marmot study, now in its eighth decade, becomes one of a small handful of mammal records long enough to read evolutionary change directly. Retrospective syntheses drawing on the basin's full archival depth appear regularly in major journals. The small data team that built the tools is, by 2050, one of the most consequential additions to RMBL's small-scale infrastructure in decades — not because it grew large, but because its leverage on a century of accumulated observation turned out to be durable. Whether RMBL by 2050 has also rebuilt the breadth the narrow campaign forwent — community partnerships, integrated instrumentation, financial reserves — depends on a second campaign the scenario does not attempt to describe. The further future is hazier than the horizon, and intentionally so.
In 2040, RMBL matters because a century of basin records have been made readable and analyzable at scales prior generations could not attempt. The small data team that did this work is one of the most consequential additions to RMBL's small-scale infrastructure in decades — turning archival depth into living research.