Date:
Do you hike, teach or just love being outside? Learn how to gather leaf, bloom and fruiting data on flowering plants and help researchers understand the effects of climate change. Don't worry about experience, as researcher Juliet Oshiro will teach you what you need to know in order to contribute to the USA National Phenology Network. Oshiro is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department who studies how plant blooming times respond to climate in the grassland and sandhills vegetation types in Santa Cruz County.
This type of work is called phenology—the study of life cycle events. It’s also referred to as the study of nature’s calendar. Life cycle events are often cued by environmental conditions such as temperature and precipitation, so naturally phenology has been a hot topic for research in an era of global change. Many species of plants and animals have advanced their calendar over the past century in response to increased temperatures.
Read an article by Juliet Oshiro about phenology.
In order to find meaningful patterns such as these, phenology research requires large datasets that span multiple years and locations. Help gather that data and take the planet's pulse!
Phenology workshop and walk, UCSC Arboretum, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz. Meeting Hall. 2-4pm. Free. Learn more about the Arboretum Phenology Walks here.
Photo by Owen Xu/Creative Commons license
