Posted on 08/05/2008 9:05:55 AM PDT by SJackson
An army of local gardeners is tracking the impact of climate change on backyard flora
When Tom Koulentes is not advising students at Highland Park High School or chasing after his own kids, he spends time behind his small Des Plaines home researching climate change.
Koulentes is recording his garden's natural history, from the weigela's first leaf to the butterfly bush's last bloom, for Project BudBurst, a new nationwide research program based on the observations of ordinary people. He is looking for local signs like an early bloom or a late-falling leaf that stem from planetwide changes.
Only a handful of researchers study plants to chronicle global warming, but millions of gardeners quietly keep watch on their plants. BudBurst seeks to tap that potential, asking "citizen scientists" to monitor plants alongside trained scholars.
"If just scientists were working on this, there's no way we could obtain a data set of this size," said Kay Havens, director of plant science and conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and one of the project's organizers.
Participants in BudBurst monitor one or more plants, native or non-native, throughout the growing season. Along the way, they record and report the dates of events such as the first flower or first seed. Like many citizen science programs, BudBurst is modeled after the Audubon Christmas bird count, an annual volunteer effort that has provided ornithologists with a century's worth of data.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Great birding!
Linked, thanks for the ping.
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