I have just had one of those incredibly satisfying moments where I learned about a new resource (new to me!) with the potential to change the way I work with science data and interact with nature. That’s a pretty big statement. We all live and work in a world that is rapidly changing. Sometimes that’s unsettling, but having resources to help you make sense of that change is a big deal. Enter Nature’s Notebook, a citizen science program introduced to us here by our friend and awesome urban ecologist Sara Gagné.
Read below to learn about Nature’s Notebook, how to participate in citizen science that tracks change, and other great resources from our friends at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.
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Written By Sara Gagné, Urban Ecologist, UNCC
In North Carolina, nature seems to take a break during the month of August. The heady activity of spring and early summer has waned, but it’s not yet time for most birds to move south, for other animals to take refuge from the approaching cold, or for most deciduous trees to call it a year and drop their leaves. My yard and neighborhood are relatively quiet, except for a few rowdy Mississippi kites bullying a juvenile red-tailed hawk perched in a dead street tree. I’ve noticed the tulip poplar leaves are starting to shade into yellow and the dogwoods are beginning to get a red glow, but all the trees in and around my yard still have full canopies. In New Bern where I spent last weekend, I didn’t see a single swallow – the barn swallows have all moved on from their nests and the tree swallows have yet to arrive from the north.
The other thing I noticed while in New Bern was the enormous hurricane moving towards North Carolina. Hurricane tracking has become a regular part of life for me, as I suspect it has for many people across the state. These days, hurricanes are harbingers of our changing climate and its impacts on our lives, and the lives of the animals and plants we live amongst.
This post in the “Explore Your Nature Neighborhood” series is about change: how plants and animals are changing their behavior over time in response to changing environmental conditions, especially those associated with climate. In the Nature’s Notebook video, Christine Goforth, the Head of Citizen Science at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, explains how each of us can contribute to the National Phenology Network’s Nature’s Notebook program. Nature’s Notebook is a citizen science initiative designed to track changes in the timing of plant and animal seasonal activity. All you have to do is choose a location that you visit regularly, pick which plants and/or animals that you are most interested in, and make weekly observations about their seasonal changes in activity.
As you might imagine, the data that Nature’s Notebook observers are collecting – standardized, detailed observations over many years – are very difficult to come by, especially across such a vast country as the United States. But this is exactly the kind of data that ecologists need to be able to better understand the effects of climate change on our ecosystems, and because we depend on our ecosystems for food and shelter and our well-being, on us.
I perused the 215 publications that used Nature’s Notebook data or other data produced by the National Phenology Network to get an idea of the kinds of things that citizen science data collected over time can teach us. I discovered research that shows that the observations of flowering made by Nature’s Notebook volunteers predict the amount of pollen in the air produced by walnuts, pines, and maples. Trees and understory plants along the Appalachian Trail are leafing out earlier in the year in response to warming spring temperatures since 2004. And, most interestingly from an urban ecology standpoint, plant leaves remain green longer into the fall in more urban areas, but only in colder regions. In warmer regions, urban leaves die sooner than their rural counterparts, perhaps because of the double whammy of warming climate and urban heat island effect. I also discovered the National Penology Network’s Visualization Tool, where you can check, just like I just did, exactly when to expect tulip poplar leaves to start turning yellow – about now as it turns out.
I had not heard about the Nature’s Notebook program before watching Chris’s video. Now, I plan to choose a species or two in my yard and start participating this fall, with the help of my 6-year-old of course. We might even take a moment and learn how to draw budding leaves next spring using a texturing technique in our nature journals. Watching how the small things in nature change over time – and using that information to better understand our world through programs like Nature’s Notebook – helps us make sense of the bigger picture. Funnily enough, it also makes us feel like things will be alright in the end.
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Thank you to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for partnering with the NC Science Trail.
