News & Publications

As of April 24, 2017, the National Phenology Database has reached 10 million records! Each record is a response to a question about phenology activity for a particular plant or animal species on a unique day and time, by a unique observer.

Read more about this milestone in this story in UA News.  

Find out what 10 million records means: 

March 20th is the Spring Equinox, which marks the official start of spring on your calendar. In 2017, the biological start of spring occurred much earlier than average in a large part of the Great Basin, Great Plains, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic.  Spring also arrived 2-3 weeks early across much of the South, although it typically has arrived by March 20th and therefore is represented as "average conditions" on this map. In the Great Basin and central Great Plains, spring arrived even earlier than 2012, a recent year with a very early start to spring.

The USA-NPN is part of a new study published in Ecosphere that shows spring is advancing in 75% of 276 National Parks studied. This shift is "extreme" in half of the Parks.

Dedicated volunteers have been tracking the phenology of cloned and common lilacs for decades, and these observations have been invaluable in documenting plant responses to changing spring conditions. In 2012, we launched a campaign to garner more commitment among Nature's Notebook participants to tracking lilacs.

We reached one million observation records in the database on Monday, April 30, 2012! That's one million standardized records on the status of a phenophase for a plant or animal, collected by participants in Nature's Notebook, citizen and professional scientists across the nation.

Joe Caprio initiated the first spatially extensive phenology monitoring in the United States. As a professor in the College of Agriculture at Montana State University, he collaborated with agricultural experiment stations in the 1950s to employ phenology to characterize seasonal weather patterns and improve predictions of crop yield. This project eventually included around 2,500 volunteer observers distributed throughout 12 Western states.