USA-NPN Director Theresa Crimmins' first book, Phenology, will be published as a part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series just in time for spring, on March 4!
March 17-21, 2025
March 16-20, 2026
March 18-22, 2024 is Phenology Week - a virtual celebration of the seasonal cycles of plants and animals! The purpose of Phenology Week is to celebrate YOU, our Nature's Notebook observers, Local Phenology Programs, and partners! We'll have webinars, awards, daily challenges, observer stories, and more!
This week, we reached a significant new milestone - thirty million phenology records submitted to the National Phenology Database! The 30 millionth record was collected via Nature’s Notebook, the USA-NPN’s plant and animal phenology data collection platform, by Nika Gonzaga, a freshman in Desert View High School's Honors Biology Program in Tucson, Arizona. Nika observed young leaves on a desert willow tree. Nika said "as a freshman, this is my first time ever gathering research like this. It was enjoyable and a very simple task. I hope to do more research on other plants."
The USA National Phenology Network laments the passing of Marjorie Helen Schwartz, a long-time lilac observer and mother of USA-NPN co-founder Mark D. Schwartz. Marjorie died peacefully on December 21, 2021 at the age of 93. She lived all her life in the Thumb of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, an area shaped like that digit on a mitten which juts into Lake Huron. After she married Mark’s father, Donald J. Schwartz, in 1954, they lived in Gagetown, a small village in Tuscola County, where sugar refining, ethanol processing, and growing grains and beans dominate the local economy.
Each summer, we deliver a Buffelgrass Pheno Forecast to aid managers in knowing where and when invasive buffelgrass is green across Southern Arizona. The forecast is based on known precipitation thresholds for triggering green-up to a level where management actions are most effective. In 2021, we added weather station-based forecasts of buffelgrass green up to the gridded forecasts to provide managers with additional data about rainfall.
Spring leaf out is off to an early start this year in much of the Southeast. USA-NPN's Director Theresa Crimmins joined Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams on The Weather Channel on January 23, 2020 to talk about the implications of an early spring. Some locations are seeing spring leaf out three weeks ahead of normal (a long-term average of 1981-2010).
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) uses USA-NPN observational protocols to track plant phenology. In October of 2019, we ingested over 2.5 million phenology data records collected on more than 5,000 individual plants observed at 78 NEON sites collected between 2013-2019 into the USA-NPN's National Phenology Database. These data are reflected in the map of observation records below and are available for visualization and download.
On October 4-5, 2019, the USA-NPN's National Coordinating Office (NCO) hosted the first Clinic designed specifically for Local Phenology Leaders (LPLs) working on long-term Local Phenology Programs (LPP) using Nature's Notebook. The Clinic was inspired by the gathering for the 10-year anniversary of the USA-NPN in October 2018, where many Leaders said they would welcome the opportunity to get together again in person and share id
In 2018, we commemorated 10 years of the USA National Phenology Network and data collection with Nature's Notebook.
On October 19th, we brought together USA-NPN partners and Nature's Notebook leaders and observers at the home of the USA-NPN's National Coordinating Office in Tucson. There we reflected on the last 10 years of the USA-NPN and envisioned the next 10 years.
We know that the timing of spring is changing. What does that mean for migratory birds?