WK 31 - Generating and Using Community Science Phenology Data

Session Description: The theme of our proposed session focuses on current efforts to better generate, integrate and utilize in-situ plant phenology resources in an effort to generate a planetary view of phenology and its change. We focus our efforts on introducing key new tools and resources that promise to help support the phenology research community sustainably into the future. In part, we will introduce the community to Phenobase, a newly-launched NSF-funded project to help support data and model integration for plant phenology resources. Phenobase is a toolkit for integrating and making available in-situ data on phenology from multiple sources.

Three of the major sources of data for Phenobase include the community science programs Nature’s Notebook, Budburst, and iNaturalist. These programs engage volunteer and professional scientists in the collection of phenological information through a combination of direct in situ observation and crowd-sourced photo documentation that can be annotated for phenological status by people who uploaded the photos or by other community scientists. Participants will gain an understanding of these three programs and the differences in the data they yield. We will interact with the workshop participants to show them how they can contribute to phenology monitoring, how to directly access the data, and how Phenobase can help solve integration challenges.

The final part of the workshop will provide a set of best practices for accessing and using incidental or opportunistic phenology data. During this part of the workshop, we will interact with the workshop participants to demonstrate how to assemble data from multiple sources, how to deal with observer effort, how to choose a scale for analysis, which phenometrics are often relevant, and how to deal with outliers (and quality control in general).

The intended audience is anyone interested in working with community science phenology data including undergraduate students, graduate students, educators who would like to incorporate phenological data collection and/or analysis, researchers, and anyone else interested in the applications of broad-scale phenology data. Participants should bring a laptop so they can practice accessing data from all three platforms, along with a prototype Phenobase resource, and immediately begin exploring the types of data.