Phenology - the science of recording nature

Phenology is a booming citizen science in the UK at the moment, where after an absence of 50 years, a new national scheme was set up in the autumn of 2000.

Phenology is the monitoring and study of recurring natural phenomena by way of recording the arrival, departure, and other key events in the life history of the phenomena. This data can assist in building a database of relevant dates to work out if any changes are due to climate change.

I'd never heard of it until this year when I saw the video below about phenology from the Woodland Trust. I was amazed by the story of Jean Combs who has been recording the date on which the trees in her area came into leaf; for the past 65 years! This intrigued me and I decided to find out more.




Looking at the site run by the Woodland Trust and the Centre of Ecology & Hydrology; Nature's Calendar, we can see that the records are split into spring and autumn. After a quick registration to use the website you're able to add postcodes of the 10km square areas that I would like to enter data for.  Nature's Calendar is a friendly site and says that they are very happy to have locations with only 1 or 2 records, which is ideal because some locations are visited only once a month.

Both spring and autumn datasets look at trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses, birds, insects, amphibians and fungi. To make entering your dates even easier the main page for spring and autumn change when the newer species are likely to be first recorded. For example the spring page currently has bluebell (first flowering), silver birch (budburst), peacock (first recorded), cuckooflower (first flowering), horse chestnut (first leaf), and swallow (first recorded).

To get some instant gratification you can view the seasonal event species maps which have a glider that adds dots to the UK for when sightings were made. For instance, the map below shows the first flowering of bluebells up until the 25 March 2012 - which is when I added my sighting from near Bath.

http://www.naturescalendar.org.uk/

There are also loads of resources on the website giving interesting facts on the species to record and tips on identification, along with really cool desktop images. There's also a great phenology guide.

Each year the project releases a document stating the key things that happened in the previous year. for instance we can see that Lilacs flowered on 16 April 2011, 25 days earlier than the normal (and the earliest on the database) and that there seems to be a trend for things flowering before their normal times. But it's not just for us to have a quick look and then dismiss the results or use them for coffee break chats, the scientists are using them too. A couple of the summaires of current research using these data are:
"What causes geographical differences in phenology of a species, particularly the balance between genetics and environmental factors?"
and
"How have recent cold winter temperatures affected flowering of hawthorn and blackthorn?"

I've not been overly helpful as yet with only 6 recordings, but I'm hoping that it's 6 more than the project would have had - which can only be beneficial. So, I hope that you'll all check it out and maybe give it a go. Even though we're currently half way through spring, there's still a lot of things to look out for and record. Some of which you may even be able to log from your bedroom window, showing that you don't necessarily need to go out of your way to help this project or our scientists with this important work!