Day 42: Calling citizen scientists – track your backyard blooms

Got crocus? The National Phenology Network wants to know about it, for a new data-collection project on the start of spring.

After a winter that’s seemed long and harsh in much of the country, there’s good reason to be excited about the earliest signs of spring.

Here’s one more: It can help scientists track climate change.

The popular National Public Radio program “Science Friday” apparently crashed the server at the National Phenology Network’s website this afternoon, by airing a story about how citizen scientists can help kickstart a database with simple, seasonal information from their own backyards. The term phenology refers to the study of seasonal events. 

Once the new visits subside, the site will be the place where people can go to report the traditional signs of spring, such as the day their crocuses flower, or — as citizens in the United Kingdom have been reporting for years — the first day they have to mow their lawns. 

An earlier onset of spring is believed to be a symptom of global warming. Some data suggest, for example, that spring is coming as much as a month early in parts of the American southwest. When that happens in arid areas, an earlier spring can set up plants to die in longer, hotter springs and summers before the arrival of summer rains or cooler fall temperatures. The new, citizen phenology database will be available for scientists who are trying to get a more complete picture of climate change.  

Jake Weltzin, executive director of the National Phenology Network and a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Science Friday’s host, Ira Flatow, that it’s regrettable the dataset wasn’t started 30 years ago, so that the new information would have context. But better late than never, the project’s creators think. And anyway, plenty of historic records are surfacing. Weltzin put out a call for “shoebox” data sets, including notes about springtime plantings, frosts and harvests that are often found stashed in people’s attics. History-making naturalists like Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold also kept springtime records, with Thoreau monitoring the progress of some 600 plant species in Concord, Massachusetts and on Walden Pond.

One of the show’s listeners, John Latimer, called in to say he’s been leading a charge to track phenology data in northern Minnesota for 30 years through a community radio program, KAXE.  (Latimer has a Twitter account at @phenology.) 

Weltzin says any data will be a welcome addition to the site, whether from backyard observers or coordinated efforts among boys and girls clubs, for example, or mail carriers. 

“We’re looking for 100,000 observers over the next few years,” he said. Right now, people must visit the site and record their observations in a simple online form, but Weltzin added that the site is working on new tools to make outreach even easier, via social networks like Twitter and mobile phone applications.