Phenology at scale

We have launched a number of recent phenology expeditions, as experiments and under our “Labs” section of Notes from Nature. We have gathered some great data from those efforts, and we are now excited to expanded further here, related to two ongoing on research projects. Our first attempt at expansion is now posted as a new expedition entitled, “Predicting Past and Present Phenology I”. So let’s talk about how your help can move forward some great science and informatics endeavors.

The first project is related to work to integrate phenological information coming from multiple sources. Over the past few years, we have been working on building data integration tools in order to bring together data from two different and major observation networks, the National Phenology Network (npn.org) here in the United States, and the Pan-European Phenology Network (http://www.pep725.eu/). Integrating these data is longer, neat story that involved building an ontology for plant phenology (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00517/full) and using a set of cool tools to end up with a new portal to find integrated phenology data (plantphenology.org). We are excited to now integrate herbarium data with the observation records as a next step. That will require some extra effort, since herbarium sheets only show parts of plants, not the whole plant, but we are working on the logic of how to do this. And we want to showcase citizen science efforts to help build these coordinated data resources, which is where you come in. We’ll be integrating the results of your efforts right into plantphenology.org!

But wait, there is more…

We are also working on a project looking at how regional urbanization along with climate change can both impact phenology. Urbanization can impact phenological timing of plants via especially increasing temperatures through the urban heat island effect. How such urbanization and overall climate changes impact phenology can be examined in the present looking at spatial patterns, but its very exciting to also be able to look at these questions temporally as well. How have trends over time in urbanization impacted phenology trends e.g. earlier flowering. Herbarium specimens can provide that critical look at the trends across time. We have explicitly chosen groups with relatively rich records in the 19th and 20th centuries that are also well studied today. We will presenting some of the results of this work over upcoming blog posts.

A couple notes about this expedition and the ones to follow. First, we are still experimenting with how to best capture phenology information from specimens, and feedback on how easy or hard you find the expedition(s) is much appreciated. Second, we have decided to present more than one taxa in the same expedition. We know this makes it challenging, and if you have issues, please let us know. We haven’t provided extensive help per species, but have tried to point you to some possible sources to check out more information.