191 of 411 long-term mammal studies terminated; 63-year marmot record cut

Blumstein 2025 analyzed 411 long-term mammal studies and found that 191 had been terminated. Among the cases is a 63-year yellow-bellied marmot time series at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory rejected for future funding on the explicit grounds that it had "too much data" (S-0034).

The marmot case is illustrative of the deeper structural problem. A 63-year continuous mammal-population time series is exactly the kind of record that becomes more valuable as it accumulates — for disease ecology, conservation genetics, climate response, and population dynamics modeling. The funding decision treated long duration as a liability rather than an asset, which is what happens when the funding mechanism is grant-cycle scoped (3-5 years) and the dataset is decade-scoped.

Recommendation R5 (fund preservation through facilities-and-administrative cost recovery) is the operational response: align the duration of funding with the duration of preservation need. The 191 terminated studies are the empirical input for that recommendation.

This is also the strongest single piece of evidence for C-0019's claim that long-term datasets are cumulative capital assets: the ones being terminated are not failed projects, they are scientific infrastructure that the funding mechanism is structurally unable to maintain.