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| Citizen Scientists Track Climate Change |
137 Views |
| posted on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 |
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CITIZEN SCIENTISTS TRACK CLIMATE CHANGE
By Georgia Tasker
Miami Herald
March 2, 2008
Original Link
Want to become a citizen scientist and help track climate change?
Take a notebook and pencil on a walk around the block or your own backyard and look for the first new flower on the shaving brush tree or the first open amaryllis or the first flowers on the live oak. Write down the name and the date.
Click on Project Budburst and enter your findings. You'll join thousands of others across the country who are recording the first buds to open, the first leaves to unfurl this spring. Your data will be used by atmospheric and climate scientists, botanists and ecologists who want your help in tracking signs of change.
Project Budburst is a national effort designed by scientists who need the data to plan for the effects of climate change on natural ecosystems. It was launched in mid-February.
Keeping track of the timing of natural events is a science called phenology.
''Natural events can be anything from when a plant leafs out, blooms or sets fruit to when birds migrate and insects hatch out,'' explained Kay Havens, director of the Institute for Plant Conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Havens is on the committee that designed Project Budburst. Her specialty is pollination biology, and she explains that climate change can have a major impact on flowers and their pollinators.
As the climate changes and flowers appear earlier than in the past, their pollinators -- bees, hummingbirds, flies, beetles, wasps and birds -- may not be there. Without setting seed and producing future generations, plants could face extinction, she said.
''Some of the scientists here are interested in using computer models of potential future climate change scenarios to help predict where plants may move if they're going to survive,'' she said.
Native plants across the country have been selected for watching (the website lists 30 trees and shrubs, 24 wildflowers and several weeds). It also suggests trees in Florida, although all but one, the red maple, are North and Central Florida species. However, South Florida bud watchers can participate, say the organizers.
''It's set up so you can monitor any tree or plant species you want,'' said Sandra Henderson, in charge of education and outreach with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which runs the project.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden has for many years listed what's blooming at the garden entrance, but records have not pointed to specific bloom times.
Mike Davenport, director of living collections and garden landscapes at Fairchild, said in an e-mail, "We have just this year started thinking about which trees might be appropriate to track.
''I think it may be hard to measure tropical trees because they never really go dormant and flowering can be related to chills or rain,'' he said. However, he suggested that several flowering trees and shrubs would be worthy tracking subjects, including Tabebuia, Bombax, Pseudobombax, Ceiba, Adansonia, Dombeya and Clerodendrom. He also would include jade vine and amaryllis.
Marilyn Griffiths, who keeps the garden's plant records, said natives also will be tracked. Currently, she said, volunteers walk through the garden and make note of what's flowering. ''We can see trends from what the volunteers tell me, but nothing very specific,'' she said.
Our native live oaks, which belong to the temperate beech family, have a spring flush of growth and flower in the spring as well. Sweet bay magnolia, a member of the temperate magnolia family, grows in our wetlands. According to Barry Tomlinson's The Biology of Trees Native to Tropical Florida, the sweet bay flowers ''occur in spring, from March to June.'' This would be another candidate to check for exact timing, as would red maple, coastal plain willow and wax-myrtle, all temperate species at the southern limits of their range.
Keith Bradley with the Institute for Regional Conservation suggested some wildflowers as well, including the grass pink orchid, goldenrod, blue-eyed grass.
Botanist Jennifer Richards, at Florida International University, researches wetland plants and suggests several plants in the Everglades that would make good subjects.
''Bald cypress makes cones about now,'' she said, ``and then they put out new leaves. Sawgrass flowers in May.''
The flowering times of sagittaria, pickerel weed and water lilies also would be good to watch, Richards said. Pickerel weed grows all the way to Canada, Richards said, so it would be interesting to compare how the plants differ in their flowering times.
Most people have impressions of things being in flower or bearing fruit, but seldom make close observations. ''It's such detailed information that anything would bear intellectual fruit,'' she said.
To make observations, you can register online and have your observations saved. An activity guide can be downloaded, telling you how and what to observe. And there are guides for teachers as well as students available on the Project Budburst website.
''Some of our best data is coming from horticulturists and gardeners,'' Havens said.
''We expect significant climate changes over the next 10 to 20 years,'' she said. "We know many plants may not be able to adapt through natural selection in that time frame. They will need to migrate. But given that habitats are so fragmented, migration will be difficult.
"One scenario that is controversial is assisted migration. Are we going to be able to help species move a couple of hundred miles north to help them survive, and what are the ramifications of doing that? In essence, if we do help them, we'll be gardeners of nature.''
The project will continue for at least five years, Havens said, and preferably much longer. In the meantime, scientists also will be planning other conservation activities, such as large-scale seed banking of natives before the big changes that are expected in the next two decades.
Last year, more than 900 observations were submitted during the pilot project, Havens said. "Two-thirds were from children younger than 12. We were thrilled to get them away from their media games.''
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TO PARTICIPATE
To join project BudBurst, go to:
http://www.budburst.org
Project BudBurst is funded by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It is supported by the National Science Foundation and Windows to the Universe, a website hosted by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 70 universities offering doctorates in atmospheric and related sciences
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NHNE Climate Change Resource Page
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