Print PageRecurring plant and animal life cycle events are called “phenology”, and information on the timing of these seasonal events is critical to many aspects of human life, including agriculture, gardening, health, cultural events, and recreation, and nearly all ecological relationships and processes, including plant-pollinator and predator-prey relationships, competition, and carbon and water cycling. In addition, phenology is sensitive to environmental variation, particularly variation in climate.
Nature’s Notebook is the USA National Phenology Network’s plant and animal phenology observation program. Through this program, scientists and non-scientists alike are collecting phenology observations on hundreds of species of plants and animals including birds, frogs, mammals, insects, fish, and herps, following scientifically rigorous protocols. Nature’s Notebook can directly support research and decision making. The phenology observations collected through Nature’s Notebook are maintained in the national phenology database maintained by the USA-NPN and made freely available for query, visualization, and download on the USA-NPN website.
Nature’s Notebook is an off-the-shelf program that can readily be folded into secondary and post-secondary curriculum. Additionally, many phenological stages are relatively simple to observe and record, making observing phenology an ideal way to engage students and enhance climate change education efforts.
Results/Conclusions
As of February 2011, the national phenology database encompasses over 75,000 observations of 160 species of animals and 258 species of plants from nearly 5,000 locations. Interested users may download data from the national phenology database from www.usanpn.org/results/data.
Data collected via Nature’s Notebook is being used by a variety of resource management groups. National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service will use the Nature’s Notebook interface and protocols to collect phenology information as a part of their national-scale natural resource monitoring programs.
The USA National Phenology Network has also developed training materials including scripted presentations, narrated videos, brochures, tip sheets, and posters that can be used in educational settings; these are available at www.usanpn.org/resources/resources.
This presentation will demonstrate the wide range of ways that the Nature’s Notebook program and the resultant data can be an asset to researchers, decision makers, and educators.
