Monitoring Monday - Phenology
Join us Mondays as the Clean Water Team shares information and resources on watersheds and water quality monitoring. This Monitoring Monday is about phenology.
Phenology is the study of phenomena as it applies to the recording and study of the dates of recurrent natural events (the timing of the life-cycle events in plants and animals: flowering, leafing, hibernation, reproduction, and migration) in relation to seasonal climatic changes.
Phenology is a vital field of ecological research that helps us understand how living organisms respond to environmental cues such as day length, temperature, and rainfall. It is only within the last few decades that botanists and biologists have focused on phenology as an important indicator of climate change.
Phenology scientists are trying to better understand what’s going on with our Earth and climate, citizen scientists can help them collect and organize data. Citizen science platforms for sharing photographed digital vouchers, such as Nature’s Notebook, Budburst, iNaturalist, and BirdLog are a promising sources of phenology data that are easy to use. This allows anyone to provide data and information on the timing of seasonal events in plants and animals.
Careful documentation of phenology reveals how the timing of seasonal events are changing. This information can support decision making, such as when to treat invasive species, and provide useful information, such as when the allergy season may start. As time passes, formally recorded phenology observations become an increasingly valuable historical record to ensure the well-being of humans, ecosystems, and natural resources.
Within the U.S., long-term phenology monitoring historically occurred to a limited extent. A notable exception is a multi-faceted historical lilac and honeysuckle monitoring effort, established in late 1950s and early 1960s by Joseph Caprio at the University of Montana and supplemented and sustained through the efforts of W.L. Colville (University of Nebraska), Mark Schwartz (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), and Dan Cayan and Mike Dettinger (US Geological Survey and Scripps Institute of Oceanography). This program engaged volunteers across the country in tracking first leaf and flower dates at several hundred sites over nearly four decades. These long-term records have been instrumental in showing that climate change is advancing the timing of spring across the U.S.
You can take meaningful action today to help collect meaningful data for watersheds and their communities across our state. By adding phenology to your monitoring activities creates new opportunities to get more people involved in climate change science and empowering individuals to act at home or in their communities by promoting and supporting accessible, climate actions for everyone.
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Existing apps and partnerships make it easier to expand your stewardship science activities, provide for volunteer enrichment activities when they are not conducting water quality monitoring, and offer climate change STEM outdoor education activities to your community. Phenology data can also be used together with your other watershed data to develop a better picture of what is happening in your ecosystem of concern.
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Discover and Document Changes in Nature Near You
Track changes in the timing of plant and animal seasonal activity with the Nature's Notebook program. See what it’s like to be a Nature’s Notebook observer in this video from Audubon Starr Ranch in southern California.
USA National Phenology Network is a national-scale monitoring and research initiative focused on collecting, organizing and delivering phenological data, information, and forecasts to support natural resource management and decision-making, to advance the scientific field of phenology, and to promote understanding of phenology by a wide range of audiences. https://www.usanpn.org/
The USA-NPN consists of a National Coordinating Office (NCO), helps thousands of volunteer observers and many partners, including research scientists, resource managers, educators, and policy-makers. Anyone who participates in Nature’s Notebook or collaborates with NCO staff to advance the science of phenology or to inform decisions is part of the USA-NPN.
Help track seasonal changes in plants and animals throughout the year with Nature's Notebook. Nature’s Notebook, a project run by the USA National Phenology Network (NPN) in cooperation with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), is available via mobile app or website.
Become An Observer
- Choose a location that you can visit regularly
- Pick which plants and/or animals that you want to observe from the list
- Make weekly observations to record their seasonal changes
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Local Phenology Programs
Local Phenology Programs (LPPs) are organizations or community groups that connect like-minded people in tracking phenology with Nature's Notebook. LPPs have their own goals for phenology including answering science questions, informing management decisions, and engaging others in learning about phenology. https://www.usanpn.org/community/LocalPhenologyPrograms
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EXAMPLE OF PHENOLOGY PROJECTS HAPPENING IN CALIFORNIA
California Phenology Network: Capturing California's flowers: Using digital images to investigate phenological change in a biodiversity hotspot https://www.capturingcaliforniasflowers.org/
California Phenology Project: The CPP initially focused on monitoring woody plant species in seven pilot parks, encompassing desert, coastal and mountain biomes, and building upon existing monitoring protocols and programs of project collaborators. With the help of many partners, volunteers, and docents who attended CPP-led training workshops, phenological monitoring is now being conducted in California in over a dozen regional and state parks, botanical gardens, private reserves, and University of California Natural Reserves, where ~30 native plant species are now being monitored. https://cpp.msi.ucsb.edu/
Redwoods Phenology Project: You can help us track these seasonal changes through our new phenology project in collaboration with East Bay Regional Parks. https://www.savetheredwoods.org/what-we-do/our-work/study/understanding-climate-change/community-science/redwoods-phenology-project/
Study of the Seasons: Phenology at the NRS: To keep tabs on natural schedules in California, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have launched the California Phenology Project. Led by Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Susan Mazer, graduate student Brian Haggerty, and postdoctoral fellow Elizabeth Mathews, the project is observing plants at eight UC Natural Reserves and seven national parks, a total of more than 100 monitoring sites. https://ucnrs.org/study-of-the-seasons-phenology-at-the-nrs/
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APPS THAT SUPPORT PHENOLOGY DATA COLLECTION
Project Budburst, which is managed by the National Ecological Observatory and Chicago Botanic Garden with support from the National Science Foundation, collects data on the timing of leafing, flowering, and fruiting of plants throughout the year to help scientists investigate the impact of climate change on different species. Users create lists of plants to track and then enter data and images to document the phenological stage of those plants on a regular basis. The app provides support to citizen scientists by offering recommendations for plants to track, information on local species, and lists developed by conservation organizations and other entities of interesting plants. The app also provides background information on each species and images of the different phenological stages of each plant. For fun, the app includes a flora caching game that challenges users to find different types of plants using a variety of clues. (The project also offers a mobile site that will work on any smartphone.) https://budburst.org/
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iNaturalist is a tool that lets citizen scientists document their observations of nature. Users can upload photos of plants and animals they observe, add notes, and transmit the location, date, and time of their observation. The app provides help identifying an observed species by soliciting feedback from other users. Over time, the app tracks each user's life-list of organisms observed. Citizen scientists have the opportunity to add observations to projects created by organizations or groups that are collecting certain types of data. For example, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has teamed up with iNaturalist to provide an easy way for people to add observations to EOL Collections. EOL projects on iNaturalist include collections such as Birds in North American Cities and State Flowers of the United States. Users can even create their own EOL collections and link them to iNaturalist. https://www.inaturalist.org/
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BirdLog is linked to the eBird citizen science project and provides a tool for users to enter data on bird sightings in the field. eBird was started by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Naturalist Society to compile data on bird abundance and distribution by collecting observations from birdwatchers across the globe. Users can upload species sightings into the app and transmit these data to eBird in real-time. Users enter the location, date, and time of their observation, how their observation was made (for example, did they hike a trail or stand in one spot), and the number of any species seen during the observation period on a checklist. The app also allows users to see what species have been previously reported in their area, view monthly abundance graphs for different locations, create and review their eBird checklists, and access photos and song recordings of various species. https://ebird.org/home
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