Canadian Field-Naturalist
journal

The Canadian Field-Naturalist is a quarterly scientific journal publishing original scientific papers related to natural history in North America. It accepts submissions by both amateur and professional naturalists and field biologists. It is a delayed open access journal currently edited by Dwayne Lepitzki.
History
The Canadian Field-Naturalist has been published continuously since 1880, under several names during its early years. For 7 years, beginning in 1880, the Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club issued the Transactions of the Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club annually. With volume 2 in 1887, the Transactions became a subtitle of volume 1 of The Ottawa Naturalist, a monthly publication. With volume 3 of The Ottawa Naturalist in 1889 the emphasis changed from local members' reports to national ones, and in 1919 the journal was renamed The Canadian Field-Naturalist (starting with volume 33 which was volume 35 of the Transactions, but this subtitle was subsequently dropped).
Society
The Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club was founded in 1879. It is the oldest natural history society in Canada. It has over 1000 members, with interests in all aspects of the natural world, from birds to botany and conservation.
“Canadian Field-Naturalist” enters the record as journal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Canadian, Field-Naturalist and journal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2935783. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1880, 1887, 1889 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “Canadian Field-Naturalist” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.