[Alana] Okay, thank you all for coming.
This is the phenology monitoring working session,
Exploring Benefits and Challenges
of Phenology Monitoring in the Northeast.
I'm Alana Russell.
I am a research assistant
with the University of Rhode Island.
And I just wanna mention the genesis of this
really came about, so it was a lot of talk in Rhode Island,
many different operators in amongst our groups
wondering if phenology monitoring
is something that we should be pursuing in Rhode Island.
But we started talking, and we really,
we wanted to know, what is the benefit,
what would be the real objective of doing this?
And it got us thinking, well,
to be able to compare phenology to historical monitoring
is really the benefit that we want,
but we don't have that historical data.
When is the right time to start that?
Well, probably yesterday.
So just, we were doing a bit of a cost-benefit analysis
within our groups.
And we started conversing with Alyssa.
So I'll have Alyssa introduce herself in a minute,
Alyssa Rosemartin.
She's with the National Phenological Network
and is a little bit more in the know
about phenology monitoring, a little bit.
And we roped her in
and started asking her some of these questions.
And we decided that having a working session
at the FEMC conference might be a fruitful endeavor.
And we're hoping to get perspectives
from everybody in the room and everybody virtually
about what's going on in their state.
Then what would be a state-like response,
what would be a regional response.
And that's really the genesis of it.
So I'm gonna hand it over to Alyssa,
introduce yourself and give an intro.
Awesome, thanks so much, Alana.
I'm glad to be co-facilitating hybrid with you.
There's still a little bit of background noise.
I don't know if in the room, just while you were talking,
so I don't know if there's, it's hard to tell.
If there's a door open or something,
maybe we can, it sounds a little better now.
I'm not sure if that's 'cause I'm talking.
But yeah, so I'm just really excited to be here
and connect with all of you online and in the room.
Our plan, Alana and I devised this plan
with the goal in mind to share lessons learned
across different phenology monitoring efforts
happening in the region
and develop some groundwork for FEMC partners
to make informed decisions about the return on investment,
right, the relative priority of any phenology monitoring
or perhaps of regionally-coordinated phenology monitoring
with the focus on forests.
So we were thinking to do brief introductions.
I wonder if maybe we'll save that for the breakout piece,
introduce ourselves as we're discussing in the breakouts.
I was just gonna briefly
go over some background on phenology,
what we do at the network, and Alana's collected great info
on what's happening at the state level.
And I have some information on local phenology efforts
happening in the region as well.
And then we'll focus our time talking with each other,
breakout discussions on what the potential is,
on the challenges, and where we can go from here.
The output, we'll create some,
there's obviously the conference proceedings
with the page on this working group
that we'll go in there
and then we'll also share the results of our discussion,
the potential and the challenges,
in some nice format for you all.
So I've been hearing,
I've only been able to catch part of the conference today,
but I feel like phenology has come up a lot.
It's probably not a hard sell.
We know it's important to all kinds of ecosystem
and biogeophysical processes,
carbon cycling, water cycling.
And we see it's both a driver
and a response to climate change,
or in response to climate change,
and there's feedback to climate change.
It's also really practically relevant
in terms of invasive species control,
I already mentioned the carbon cycle,
human health in terms of allergies,
and cultural events like festivals
or wildflower viewing
or fall leaf foliage viewing.
Maybe this is a great summary
of what's going on at the state level.
If Alana, do you wanna jump in on this part?
[Alana] Sure, so I sent out a little bit of a survey
that was primarily sent to the state coordinators of FEMC,
but I asked them to share it with any of their partners
that they thought could have relevant perspectives.
So the whole point was really just
to maybe try to get a summary
of what is currently happening regionally
in terms of forest phenology efforts.
So Vermont, Josh Halman
sort of presented earlier this morning
on some of their phenology efforts.
But to echo what he had said this morning,
and this is partnered with FEMC,
they monitor bud break of sugar maple
at one site in Vermont.
They monitor fall color and leaf drops
at another site at three different elevations.
And they also more recently have started
in basic plant species phenology projects.
They're looking at development
and timing of different invasive plant species.
Connecticut, I had a lot of contributions from Connecticut.
Their answers were definitely,
I mean, great to hear that there were many efforts,
but kind of widespread.
They are piloting an invasive understory mapping tool,
which is using time series, I think, Landsat imagery.
There's also a program since I think the 1960s
of Persian lilac springtime development.
They're looking at different phenophases of Persian lilac.
And also, some people are,
there's a first bloom monitoring study sort of
that was really happening in Norfolk, Connecticut
between the '40s and the '70s.
There was a long break, a couple of decades,
and then that's recently been revisited
from 2012 to 2020, I think.
So there's opportunity to compare
that first bloom data between those two time periods.
In Rhode Island, we have the plant phenology project,
which is a citizen science project
where bud break, leaf color, leaf drop,
and flowering and fruiting are data that are collected.
And Massachusetts has their Landscape Message,
which is a message that is put out multiple times a year
conveying plant and pest development.
And this really kinda garners site-specific records
of different plant and pest development milestones,
but it's on their Landscape Message database or archive,
so you're able to look back and see and maybe take notes
on some of these site-specific changes
that are happening specific to each site.
But bottom line, there's a lot of activities
that are happening, but there's really not much overlap
in the objectives and methodologies
that are happening regionwide.
That's all I have.
Thank you.
That's a really great overview.
So yeah, so I work for the USA National Phenology Network.
I decided to introduce myself too much.
I live in Coastal Massachusetts,
and I've worked for over a decade at the Phenology Network,
which is federally funded, based at University of Arizona.
We are focused on collecting, storing,
and sharing phenology data and information
with the goals to advance science,
inform decisions, communicate, connect,
and also grow an equitable and inclusive network.
And so we do this by a citizen
and professional science program across the country,
where people are collecting data using a standard format
on over 1600 species of plants and animals.
We have a lot of different tools
for accessing and visualizing the data.
This one is showing one of our activity curves
where you can compare milkweed,
the number of yes records for milkweed
and the number of yes records for monarch butterflies.
And I mean, this whole thing works
through partnership, right?
I feel a resonance with FEMC
because we're a small staff with so many partners out there
who are doing the work on the ground.
So there's a lot of Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service,
NEON sites, academic institutions,
and hundreds of nonprofit organizations
that are collecting phenology data
and bringing people together
around specific questions of interest.
So this is a screen cap
of all of the local phenology projects
happening in New England.
And I'll just,
there's a number of nonprofits near me in Boston,
Earthwise Aware.
What other one was I gonna mention?
There's the Linda Loring out on Nantucket,
also has a really great program.
So there's so many to pick,
and I don't wanna take up all the time talking.
So I'll just quickly mention, up at Acadia National Park,
they're using phenology monitoring
to look for vulnerable species
to plan when they're gonna go out and monitor
to better understand visitor season
and to engage people in the science of phenology,
science of climate change.
Appalachian Mountain Club, I know Georgia,
I don't know if she's in the room, I know she's there.
Georgia Murray has been leading this amazing program
for many years, looking primarily at flowers,
wildflowers along the Appalachian Trail
and in the White Mountains using our program.
The NEON site, also up in the Whites at Bartlett,
which is a really cool tool on the NEON website now
where you can see the green squares here
are their phenology plots.
You can see the location of the NEON,
National Ecological Observatory Network tower.
So on the right is the PhenoCam from the tower,
and you can kind of look at,
so NEON's data is automatically ingested into NPN's database
and serves through our tools.
So I was able to make an activity curve for Bartlett,
showing the proportion of yes records for red maple leaves
and look at the similarities, differences
from the PhenoCam greenness curve from the PhenoCam.
So it's cool when there's co-located multiple ways
of looking at phenology in the same spot.
And then I saw Kerissa is here.
She coordinates The New York Phenology Project,
which has so many sites across the State of New York
and coordinates on questions of interest, I think,
around pollinators and climate impacts.
So yeah, I think it sort of already came up
through what Alana was describing.
There's so many species,
and there's so many things to be interested in,
and so we're always trying to strike a balance
between driving data collection towards certain species
so that we have enough coverage to be able to say something
about how climate change is impacting red maples.
But there's also, we're always trading that off
with, well, what do people actually care about,
and what changes are they seeing on the ground?
So one way that we do this is through this set of campaigns.
On the left are the three big tree campaigns,
the Green Wave, which is maples, oaks, and poplars,
and Quercus Quest, which is focused on,
I think, 11 species of oaks,
and then The Redbud Project,
which is focused on flowering in redbud.
And then on the right,
it's more the insect and interactions,
the Nectar Connectors, Pesky Plant Trackers,
which Elizabeth Spinney is here, who works on that project,
and Pest Patrol, which is also looking,
having folks go out and look for those invasive insects.
Quick pitch for standardized data across a whole region
enables these bigger kinds of studies
that enable us to look back to past changes.
So the farthest left graph
shows earlier flowering in black cherry,
advancing one day per decade,
or one day per year since 1870.
Project future changes,
this is modeled future changes for red maple,
depending on the scenario, maybe a week to a month earlier.
And then the far right one looks at species interactions.
So you can see understory for phenology
being more sensitive to temperature than tree phenology
in terms of measured, in terms of days per degree Celsius.
So,
just wanted to also throw out a quick pitch.
This is basically unrelated,
but since we have the audience in the room,
just a quick pitch also for our Pheno Forecast.
So we take growing degree day models
and make these gridded maps available
that allow you to estimate
when you might expect to see
for emerald ash borer adults.
This can help shape monitoring programs or engaging people.
And you can also sign up for these notifications,
where if it's two weeks away, you'll get an email that says,
hey, time to start looking now.
So we think this might have a lot of potential for engaging,
if there's more private landowners engaging
in monitoring for EAB, for example, this could be relevant.
So I think, there's Alana in my contact info.
I think from here, Alana can set me straight,
but I think we'll just go into a breakout
to talk about what everyone thinks the potential is
for phenology monitoring, coordinated phenology monitoring
in the region.
Yeah, I think, so we'll have 20 minutes.
I was hoping, in the room,
you could either break up two
or three or four groups to discuss this.
I will mute.
I'll make sure that we're not gonna distract each other
virtually and in person.
And I also want to apologize to the virtual people
'cause I knew I was,
I just realized I was outside of the camera
for the first part of what I was just saying.
But yeah, so Alyssa, if you're ready,
I will do my thing on here.
Super.
Yeah, so online, I think,
feel free to come off of mute and on camera.
And that way, we can,
Georgia's here virtually, yay, and Kerissa.
So yeah, I'd love for us to, and I can take some notes,
but, oh, I don't think we put the prompt up,
but yeah, basically, we're interested,
let me, I can put the prompt in the chat.
We're interested in what everyone thinks
the potential is for phenology monitoring
to help further your own objectives or priorities.
I can break the ice
and just be the one that blathers on first.
So, hi, all.
My name's Elizabeth Spinney.
I use she/her pronouns.
And I am a local phenology leader through NPN
and just this year started our own local phenology project
called the Vermont Invasive Plant Phenology Project,
which was mentioned in Alana's.
And we are monitoring Asiatic bittersweet,
Morrow's honeysuckle, and common or European buckthorn,
which are three invasive understory plants
that we struggle with here in the Northeast and in Vermont.
And we are basically trying to,
through this project, create a baseline dataset
'cause there's currently an absence of strong,
widely available phenology data for these species,
both to be able to track phenological shifts
that are predicted to occur with climate change,
but also to be able to assist land managers
in timing their management activities,
because if someone asks us when something's flowering
or fruiting, we honestly can't scientifically say when.
So we're very, very into phenology.
Yeah, I could speak next
to also being a group very into phenology.
Certainly, we've been doing phenology
in the White Mountains since 2004
and started working with the National Phenology Network
as they became who they are today
and have appreciated the consistency and the,
I often call them the protocol police, but in a nice way
because I think that allows us to compare
when we wanna ask those questions.
But in particular, AMC is really looking at it
through the lens of climate change.
And so what we wanted to understand
was how climate change was unfolding
specifically in the mountains, where there's less data.
So we've done that through partnerships and citizen science
and through having facilities
in the back country.
We're lucky enough to have that,
and that infrastructure has also, I think,
allowed us to do NPN through time.
And we can talk about that, some of the challenges
around maintaining plots
and certainly the frequency of getting to plots
that is needed, especially in springtime,
when you're really focused on springtime phenology.
But we've been lucky enough to have the support staff
to do that and the volunteers as well.
So we continue to collect that data.
Jordan presented today on some of the deeper dives
that we just started doing because, again,
it's sort of long-term monitoring
in order really to answer the questions
around climate change, we need many years of data.
And so we finally feel like we're at the point now
to start to look at which plants
are most responsive to climate change,
and so that's where we're headed
and really have benefited by the support
of the infrastructure of NPN.
So they've got the database,
the ability to input data and get data out.
So that's been really beneficial to us as an organization.
I can go.
My name's Kerissa.
I also started working with NPN pretty early on.
We worked together to evaluate protocols
and started some of the early
phenology trail projects together.
And I would say one of the things
that has been really amazing
about working with NPN and having this national platform
is the ability to catalyze regional networks
and get organizations
and institutions really connected to one another.
When I left Oregon to come to New York
after kind of testing out some of these methodologies
and realizing how much the implementing sites
could activate really unusual and interesting programs
that I hadn't even intended to happen,
but just happened, whether they were
high school senior projects at a local park or whatever.
So I came to New York with this idea and intention
to activate a regional network
and did it with very, very little funding,
pretty much just cobbled together my own funding
and then was able to reach out
to a network of institutions with a pilot.
And we did have the advantage
of the New York Botanical Garden
already having a phenology monitoring program there.
So there was at least some familiarity
with one of the institutions,
but none of the other institutions had a program.
And so we were able to,
through this kind of forming this regional alliance,
in some ways, on the back of this project
that we didn't have to come up with massive funding to do
and could really get a pilot going very fast
and then experiment with this kind of network replication.
What does it take to have these kind of nodes
then begin to branch out on their own?
And it took a couple of years only, really.
At the very beginning, I had to be the one
to kind of set up the site
and get the training programs going and all of that.
But I felt like I really wouldn't know
that the program was successful until I found out
that there were programs getting going
that hadn't called me.
And so that indeed did happen, and programs just started,
we put up resources, made a website,
and created species profiles
and how-to guides and all of that, obviously,
put a lot of what NPN already has up on that website
and those kind of self-starting resources.
Between that and then me and some of the other programs
that have been going for a while
could host consulting calls and things to get people going.
Lots of programs just were able to get started, again,
with not this massive amount of spending
or background funding.
And it allowed organizations
to really jump into the citizen science
or community science world
without having to make any kind of major investment.
And I feel like the effects of that are so far beyond
than just the phenology program itself,
just getting that ability to have coordinators
or whatever that run the citizen science programs,
then allow them to expand.
So I feel like these phenology monitoring programs
have a lot of potential for kind of a diffusion
of innovation around the program.
And then other interesting things could happen.
So for example, once this network was going,
an example is getting a call from folks
who wanted to do testing for the hemlock woolly adelgid,
the biocontrol, but didn't, New York State is so huge,
how do you create that calendar
to release the biocontrol for the adelgid
if you don't know exactly when the adelgid
is doing its thing in various parts of the state?
So Cornell and New York State partnership
contacted New York Phenology Project,
and we were able to then activate this biocontrol program
or help them with the calendar portion
of their biocontrol program.
And I think it would've been challenging for them
if there wasn't already this kind of network and taxa.
So that's an example of,
I feel like, with very little funding,
these great impacts can actually happen.
But obviously, it's all because the national network
has this platform and has these amazing people available
as resources to allow somebody like myself
to kind of catalyze a network activity
without a ton of background funding.
So I have other thoughts on further ideas
for coordinated efforts and so forth,
but I've talked too much already, so I'm gonna pass it on.
And if we feel like coming back to ideas, you can ask.
Awesome, awesome.
Yeah, don't undersell yourself.
I mean, I didn't organize the session,
just so that people would say nice things about NPN,
but all of you out there doing the work are,
I feel like, doing the harder part,
really, the ground game
and sustaining monitoring over time
and holding people together.
I am really grateful.
Yeah, does anyone else, anyone who hasn't jumped in yet,
maybe someone who's thinking about it,
what do you, but not doing anything yet,
what do you see as the potential benefit for you?
All right, I'll jump in briefly.
So I'm Kyler.
I've worked with Georgia and Jordan
within Appalachian Mountain Club
to support their phenology research.
And really, what my role has been
has been going between the research department
and the guests that we often use
to collect community science-based data
and have done a lot of communications with the visitors
and people that are off hiking in the mountains
about phenology research and climate change.
So to me, the part that's most exciting
is the ability to make abstract concepts like climate change
accessible and very tangible in a pretty simple way
with the iNaturalist app, for example.
Cool.
Alyssa, did you see the chat?
Just Amanda was saying, yep.
Yeah, hey, Amanda, thanks for that note.
Ceding her ideas, or ceding her time to Kerissa's ideas.
Yeah, we had planned,
I don't think we did a great job of framing this,
but we are planning to go 'til 3:40 with this session,
so we've got seven more minutes to talk about,
maybe this is the time to just,
'cause we're gonna talk about challenges next,
but leave that all aside, what's the dream?
What do you see as the potential,
with thinking of all the people here and in the room,
where could we go?
I guess I can jump in just real quick.
So just sort of, I very much wear,
I work in forest health, but I very much have the lenses
of working with invasive species.
And so that's sort of how I see situations
and approach them.
And I could see this being,
so particularly plants,
they're gonna grow where they grow.
They don't really care about political boundaries
that we've imposed on the landscape.
And so being able
to make conservation
or management decisions
based on data that's collected across the landscape
versus political boundaries would be really huge.
And I could see phenology
aiding in that trend of thinking.
Yeah.
Yeah, to build on that,
AMC is a conservation organization
and have in mind
the 30 by '30
land conservation target
and 50 by '50, by 2050.
So I think
that what you're saying is really important
as we consider where to target land conservation
by bringing in these regional datasets.
That could be really helpful
because then as we make decisions
around where those lands should be prioritized,
we could be making that based on science
versus individual state politics.
So I certainly agree with that.
And I guess the other thing
about bringing the region together
that might help facilitate that
is we had the Northeast Phenology Network
at one point.
We were trying to stay sort of collective
within the NPN subgroup.
And I think thinking about that kind of meeting again,
where even if we're not a group,
but certainly having a meeting
where we do invite state-level,
federal-level land managers
and then share our collective experiences
around the phenology monitoring,
I think that that's something we could do as a group
that would be really helpful.
It's sharing what we're learning
and then sharing that with some
of the land managers and conservationists
that might want to hear what we're doing, so.
It feels like time we had that,
there was a meeting in 2016, I think, up at the Whites,
and it just feels like it would be great
for a team to do that,
or maybe we make it part of FEMC or something,
but, or I don't know,
but definitely feels like there's a lot of conversation
that wants to happen.
Yeah, Alyssa, that was exactly, Georgia,
one of the things I wanted to mention,
but I was wondering, Alyssa, if there is,
is that a possibility in the near future?
Is that something that's been on NPN's mind?
Do you see that as a possibility
that NPN can support at least
with some staff time or something?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I think it's funny because it's all,
I sent out a note to a bunch of people for this thing,
and other people who weren't able to come were like,
"Hey, are you guys gonna organize another regional meeting?"
I guess it's probably time, yeah,
I think between Ellen and my time,
but I would love it to be as much as everyone else has time,
a group coordinated with you, Kerissa,
and Georgia, Elizabeth,
anyone who wants to help us pull that off would be great.
And I guess now that we know our way better around virtual,
we could decide.
Anyways, I don't wanna get into those weeds,
but yeah, we're enthusiastic.
New historical datasets come up.
In New York here, we've digitized recently,
we just put out a publication
in "Journal of Ecology" this year,
but we have a dataset from the early 1800s
that showed up, dropped out of the sky pretty much,
for the entire state.
And so it's not just a super local dataset.
So something that's relevant to all of New York State
and all the growing zones is certainly pretty relevant
to the other areas in New England
and probably has most of the same species and so forth.
So I'm sure there's
other types of datasets that have come up,
and the ability to kinda collaborate
and share those types of things would be really great.
I'm curious as to what, so is it flowering species?
It's actually plants and animals,
but the original dataset
has 900 species from the past.
But when we whittled down to see what we had
to compare with
what there was an abundance of in NPN,
we did just focus on plants for this study,
and we came down to 36 that met more stringent requirements
of how many observations, across how many growing zones,
across how many years, right,
'cause there's those multi-levels.
But the original historic dataset
has a lot more than what we just published.
So we're certainly looking at further collaborations
on other taxa and other, and actually,
it was up to 2017 when I did the analysis.
It took forever to publish it for various reasons,
but there's a lot more in the database now,
in the modern database.
So there's definitely a lot there that could be played with.
I'm certainly wanting more collaboration
with other regional phenology friends.
Yay.
Yeah.
I think we're pretty much ready
to go back to the main room.
I just texted Alana.
I don't know that I can bring us back.
I think they have to bring us back,
so we can keep talking 'til they do.
Yeah, so in the report, so we're gonna say what the,
I think that, looking at my notes,
I think we can say there's
potential to make decisions based on data,
like Elizabeth was saying and Georgia was building,
across state boundaries, make those decisions
more based on landscape or ecological scales,
more opportunity with legacy datasets
and more collaboration
to either collect parallel,
present-day data and get analyzed and interpret
and understand what's happening with those datasets.
I get, what else did we throw out there
in terms of potential?
Oh, the people, just how powerful it is
to create networks and then, here we go.
Hi, virtual friends, can you hear us?
We can, we can, we're back.
This good timing?
Yeah, it's perfect, it's great.
Great.
So Alyssa, is this gonna be pulled up on the screen,
-or was this- -Yeah, I was thinking,
I will record what everyone says.
So maybe actually Kerissa or Georgia, if you wouldn't mind.
Section, and I'll just take notes on everything
on this Google doc.
Okay, I can go.
I think what we all discussed was,
oh, there's a lot of feedback,
which is making it a little hard for me to hear.
Oh, wait, now maybe it's better, okay.
All right, I think that's fine.
Was that there is opportunity in,
if there's more collaboration,
that we can really get at issues
that obviously don't follow any political boundaries.
The landscapes across the Northeast are fairly similar.
We have a lot of similar issues
in terms of invasive species and pest management,
similar enough species
where we can look at phenological sensitivity,
synchronization, and mismatch,
and that obviously these issues
don't have boundaries.
And right now, our various efforts are,
seem to be at the state level,
and that there's just opportunity to be able
to have a more bioregional focus
and really help each other with best practices
and just find out what's top of everyone's mind
in terms of the issues
that we feel like phenology monitoring
can help ameliorate.
And then also being able to share about legacy datasets,
which is something that can really
get at the climate change issues.
And again, just because a dataset is from a particular state
doesn't mean it's not relevant to other locations
that are in the same latitude or growing zone and so forth.
So that there's just value in being able
to connect across state boundaries,
for all of these reasons and more,
also, just from the sense of how powerful it is
to create new networks and share resources.
Yeah.
Feel free to add, if I missed something.
[Georgia] Well, I think we did mention
that it's time to have another regional meeting
where we can do all those things
that you mentioned together,
but also with land managers,
other conservation groups,
to really share
and also spread the message
of how this data can be utilized in that application.
I can speak for, I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves,
but I find that reassuring to hear
because we talked on this side of the room,
we found it a little bit amorphous to determine,
how do you monitor
with a rigorous protocol,
but also standardize amongst a region?
But hearing what you have to say and maybe bringing in
and having a meeting with this objective would help that.
But we sort of struggled
to talk about what states could be doing,
because we couldn't get past
that roadblock of the challenges,
which I know we'll talk about later,
of how would we even implement that?
Maybe we just need a little bit more optimism.
One thing that we, I think, were able to determine
was that, certainly, it would benefit
to really know completely or maybe more comprehensively
what is happening in the region.
So we gave a quick overview.
Alyssa knows so much.
We shared a lot of the activities,
and the survey that I put out yielded some
that I wasn't even aware about,
but we did some quick googling amongst our group
and found that there were other phenology monitoring efforts
that I wasn't aware about.
Some say they have detailed datasets,
well, is that data publicly available?
Can we have access to it?
And just being a little bit more communicative about it
would help us with our own individual needs
if we already have them
and then would also help us see where there's overlap
and where we really could have a regional program.
Anything else on this side of the room?
[Attendee] I'm gonna apologize for coming in so late.
Can you just reiterate
what you're trying to solicit feedback on?
Sure, sure.
So we're wondering,
can a regionwide phenology monitoring program
be implemented, and why would we want to do that?
Is there an importance?
Is there a significance?
How would you get that up and running?
This came about from Rhode Island.
Some of our partners voiced interest
in monitoring tree phenology,
mostly for the ecological perspective
of do we have changing phenology
that could relate to climate change?
But we sorta got caught in the weeds
of if we're gonna spend all this effort to do so,
why are we going to?
And the biggest value would be if we had historical data
to compare it to, but we don't have that yet.
So when is the time to start that?
-And we're starting now. -Now.
Yeah, yesterday, right?
[Attendee] Thank you, so I didn't wanna jump in
if that wasn't the topic you were on.
I don't know how many people were in here
for the last talk of the previous session before,
the tools, the tools talk,
but I think that if we could identify some way
to either automate or leverage technology
to be able to set up a regional phenology monitoring system,
I think that upfront effort would be a big investment.
But I think that the information we could get back
would be really useful.
I mean, I think about how Vermont
has used their phenology data,
but it really is from one location.
It's like that super intensive one site.
Can we build on that
by setting up some sort of automated system?
So I think PhenoCam,
there's already a phenology monitoring network that way.
Could we expand beyond even tree phenology?
Could we be using what they were talking about
in that last talk was the microphones
to assess avian phenology?
Could we be using it for amphibian phenology?
And so if these are relatively cheap to deploy,
and the data structure is already set up
to ingest that and analyze it,
could that really give us some critical information,
not historical, but moving forward,
about how things are changing and where, right?
So is it changing more in Rhode Island?
Is Rhode Island changing a lot,
but Northern Maine not really changing that much?
I think it'd be really interesting.
Yeah, I appreciate that perspective
is very relevant to the topic today.
[Attendee] I'm curious if PhenoCam
and the US Phenology Network is stuck being tree-based,
or are they able to expand
and be more of a hub for other ecosystems?
Yeah, so the PhenoCam is,
the analysis is based on greenness in the image.
So it is primarily tree-based.
I suppose there could be some,
there may be some snow melt stuff in there as well.
But yeah, our ground monitoring,
where we have people go out and observe,
is 1600 species of plants and animals.
So it's pretty, I mean,
there's still so many more species out there,
but it's fairly flexible.
And people certainly use it for,
there's a project in California
where they looked at birds
and the fruit that they're feeding on,
it can be about plant animal interactions, for sure.
And then Georgia's project
that she talked a little bit more about on our virtual group
is really focused on the montane region
that doesn't get as much data collected
and especially on the wildflowers there.
[Attendee] So it's about creating something bigger
or something beyond the Phenology Network.
[Georgia] Yeah, and I would say that there's benefits
to all those layers of data.
And bringing them together, I think, is important.
We've found that we can use iNaturalist
to capture flower phenology,
but we're not gonna be able to use iNaturalist
to capture ripe fruit timing,
which we do with the NPN network and the plots.
So there's, I guess it depends on your question
and what level of data you're looking for
and whether you really want a species level
or a particular difficult phenophase to look at
that automated systems really can't capture.
So I think there's benefits
to all of these different levels of data collection.
Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, I think to, I think,
just to kinda step back and summarize
how it's sort of shaking out from my point of view
is there's a number of arguments being made
for something regionwide, New England, New York,
coordinated could be really valuable.
And then it's like, well,
figuring out what those questions are
and then I think that would shift,
that would then set the conversation,
yeah, we should use iNaturalist or NPN
or PhenoCam or this particular, or add a legacy dataset
or this particular combination of those.
Just kind of, we've got your pile of networks and tools,
and you have your question, and you just figure out
what the right composition is for the direction
that any project like that would wanna go in.
Am I making sense?
[Attendee] Yes. (laughs)
No, I totally agree.
I think that sort of nested design is really important
for us to understand anything, right,
where you have the really intensive sites
where you can get down to the phase
or the species differences.
I do also think that maybe the other question in there is,
what are the opportunities and barriers
to even establishing anything, right?
So if there were an opportunity
to set up some sort of a citizen science PhenoCam thing
where people agree to, once a week,
go out and take a picture of this landscape
from some fixed location,
and you have now essentially PhenoCams
that you could run through the processing from all over.
That might be an opportunity where it's,
you're not buying the equipment,
you're just training citizen scientists.
Whereas in other places, there might be funding
that comes available for the installation of,
or for whatever, more data collection
on existing inventory plots or something.
Yeah, I feel like the opportunities,
we should be thinking about sort of different approaches
based on what we even have to work with.
-Right. -Yeah, and when it comes
to the citizen science piece, we've had some experience
with different phenology approaches.
And it takes a lot more work
to build a citizen science network
and maintain it than maybe people think.
And so what we've found is iNaturalist
is the easiest approach to that
because it is the easiest lift.
And someone can participate once,
or they can participate all season long.
And so I do think that when we come to challenges,
we have to remember,
when we're building these different types of networks,
what is the long-term resources?
Well, what's the initial resources,
but also what is the sustainable resources
in that program staying in place,
especially when it comes to citizen science?
Yeah, so is that a good transition,
do we think, to talking about challenges?
Yep, I think so.
Awesome.
Yeah, so I think I was gonna,
we were gonna shoot to do that as a Jamboard,
and I'll just put these up here as people shout them out.
So what are some of the challenges
to coordinated phenology monitoring?
-Money. -Resources.
What'd you say, money?
Money, yeah.
Yeah, and I think that leads into then,
well, that's why citizen science is so valuable,
but we are talking about the time and the effort
and the coordination of citizen science, and then also,
we wanna make sure it's scientifically rigorous too.
Uh-huh.
[Attendee] Honestly, I think access is another piece,
getting two plots every day
during times that you would expect
or would wanna be monitoring phenology changes
is, I think, one of those really time-intensive
and yeah, logistical challenges,
especially if you're trying to hit multiple plots.
Yeah.
Yeah, feel free to correct me
if I'm getting any of these not quite right.
[Attendee] We were talking about standardization
and just, there are so many different species,
and it can't be inferred from one to another,
especially with phenology,
how to pick which species and what to monitor.
Uh-huh.
[Attendee] How to pick which species and what to monitor.
Yes.
You mean in particular also
that species life history is different,
and so you might be collecting one thing on one plant
and another on another?
I think also, can we pick one species-
-An indicator. -An indicator, yeah,
throughout the region.
That would obviously create easy standardization.
-Great. -Canada mayflower.
So well-behaved.
[Attendee] I would throw in sampling bias
needs to be avoided and is easily introduced.
Yeah.
Totally.
[Attendee] I feel like there's a lot
of different methodologies too.
And not only does the method differ,
but I feel like a lot of it is subjective.
So even myself being out there,
if we're using a seven-class budburst system,
is it a five or a six?
You can have two people standing there
thinking something very different.
And so I do think that there's some subjectivity that just,
I mean, you're gonna see the big changes,
but if you're trying to look at more of a nuance,
for example, like the rate of greenup,
was one year particularly faster?
How do you quantify when we hit full leaf out
and how long that was since budburst?
And how many buds on the tree have to have bursts
before you call it budburst?
And I just, I feel like there does,
maybe it's my bias of being very quantitative,
but I feel like there needs to be some fix
to the subjectivity of the measurements themselves.
[Georgia] Yeah, trees are so difficult in that way,
no matter what protocol you're using.
So I agree
that it's species-dependent, in some ways.
It goes back to the which is the better bioindicator
or maybe the method.
Does the PhenoCam do a better job at trees?
[Attendee] Or should we be using light meters?
Literally, are there other approaches
that we could be using to track that?
I mean, a couple people,
when we were having our discussion,
did mention some of the remote sensing,
greenness scale, NDVI, and maybe things
that could give us some more quantitative data
in that aspect.
Yeah.
[Attendee] If I can just throw in,
I think things work better in coordination with each other.
So at least with our approach, what I've been trying to do,
you have on-the-ground observations,
which are then validated by PhenoCam,
which are then, above that, validated by satellite imagery.
So there's this nested approach.
Things are stacked on top of each other,
kinda all validating one another.
I think having access to all of those levels of information
is gonna be important, ideally in one place,
and ideally easy to get at.
Sorry, where are you based
where you're doing all three levels?
[Attendee] Sorry, what was that?
I was just wondering where you're based
with that example of the multi-level thing going on?
[Attendee] Oh, I'm with the AMC with Georgia.
Okay.
[Attendee] We're right now working on going
through PhenoCam images from Pinkham Notch,
and they're centered on woodland tree canopy plots,
which I've then, I've taken that area, and I've extracted,
I've drawn a polygon around the area
to extract Landsat and MODIS vegetation indices,
so three levels of monitoring, if you will.
-Awesome, awesome, awesome. -All synced up.
Is there anyone else online
that wants to jump in with a challenge?
[Georgia] I guess if,
specifically around the citizen science piece,
getting the data back out
to your volunteers.
I think that that,
and that may go with the resource question,
but it's really about that feedback that's really important
to keep citizen science going.
[Attendee] That's a really good point.
I think what we're focused on here is the data collection,
but who analyzes the data and to what purpose,
and then how is that disseminated and used?
That's a really good point
that I feel like we overlook a lot.
We're so focused on getting the data,
and then it sometimes sits.
Yeah, that's making me think,
kind of along the lines of a challenges,
how do you make your program
so that it continues momentum and long-term?
So on the citizen science aspect,
yes, keeping everybody engaged,
but then also just a challenge,
how do we make these long-term?
Oh, I thought you said (indistinct).
Yeah, sorry, Alana, I think yours is slightly,
it's related, but it's slightly different, right?
It's sustaining the efforts in the long term.
I don't think that's on here yet.
[Georgia] Yeah, and keeping funders interested.
Long-term monitoring is not always
top of mind for funders.
[Attendee] And I almost wonder too
if one of the challenges is just that there are a lot
of people out there doing it,
and we don't really know all of them.
I mean, I feel like we shouldn't be duplicating efforts,
but are we?
[Attendee] Along those lines, sampling intensity,
are we measuring enough, or are we measuring too much?
There's some kind of windy-sounding background.
[Attendee] I think it's the projector.
Oh, like the projector's caught.
Oh, yeah, it's right next to a microphone.
We can still hear.
These are great.
So we have 25 minutes left of our session.
If there's any other,
I think our next piece is,
what could coordinated regional phenology monitoring
look like?
What criteria would we use to determine what to focus on?
I can save this question
and put it over here in the big notes.
Does that seem right, or any other,
I'm happy to add more, or I can keep on adding challenges
as they come up over here too.
Think we have a good list of challenges.
Are we all, is everyone just feeling like, ugh,
it's too hard?
I mean, but looking at that to consider,
how do we, how do we endure?
How do we work around these?
Yeah.
I like what was said earlier
about having a sort of phenology meeting
and more of the players coming together.
This is great, we kind of started a little bit
of getting the ball rolling this working session,
but maybe we need to,
I know there's a lot of momentum maybe with more people
that are involved with US NPN et al.
But yeah, maybe we need to have something more coordinated
to really talk about it face to face.
Yeah.
[Attendee] I mean, I feel like there's low-hanging fruit,
and then there's the aspirational, sorry,
so what would a regional network look like?
I think that's the direction you wanted us to.
And when I think of low-hanging fruit,
I mean, I think the first thing
is just to identify everybody
who is doing phenology monitoring where,
and just getting them in the same place
to figure out, we're a great start,
but I think there's a lot of other players
who maybe aren't here that it would be good to engage with.
And then the other sort of low-hanging fruit is are there,
what comes out of those discussions
is where are there information gaps,
or what are the biggest needs?
What are the species we should be focusing on
or the locations, is it alpine?
Yeah, and that if we then could just apply for funding
to be able to fill those gaps.
To me, those are sort of all, I mean,
I'm not saying they'd all be successful,
but those are lower-hanging fruit.
I think more aspirational would be to figure out
how to incorporate phenology monitoring
into the forest health monitoring that's already ongoing.
And I think that's really aspirational,
just because of the timing.
I mean, if it were (indistinct), we could say, okay,
when you're doing your forest health measurements,
you're gonna add this additional monitoring effort,
but you can't do that with phenology.
So I think figuring out how that could be incorporated
to the monitoring that's already going on.
So then it could also be then analyzed
against the other data that we have for those plots
and the historical data that we have for those plots.
I think that would be great.
And then the other aspirational one
is just to instrument up the forest
and be getting sort of automated constant flows
of phenology data
from a good random sample from across the region.
[Georgia] I don't know if this would be consistent
across all the voices at this meeting,
but I see as a more aspirational point
is that this phenology data is used
in conservation decision-making
and land conservation in particular
as we look at 30 by '30 and 50 by '50.
And that the comment that was made in our group
that was really insightful is that this type of data
can use to look at things ecologically
and not politically.
Yeah.
Acquisition.
[Attendee] Where does citizen science fit in here, right?
Is that an opportunity?
Just sitting here brainstorming, I had this idea of,
well, why not on all of the trails, AMC trails, whatever,
the long trails, whatever, Appalachian trails,
you just have posts and you say,
"Hey, if you walk by,
"put your iPhone here and take a picture,
"and then here's the QR code to upload that."
And then I started.
[Georgia] I think you missed Jordan's talk.
[Attendee] Oh, I did, okay.
Do you get a lot of butts in your pictures? (laughs)
[Georgia] No, we've been using iNaturalist,
and I forget the numbers, Jordan, you could tell her,
but certainly, it works for woodland,
forbs, and alpine plants.
iNaturalist is a really great tool.
[Attendee] Yeah, no, that's awesome.
I guess I was thinking more like The PhenoCam Network.
It literally is a landscape.
So if it's on top of Mount Mansfield or Mount Washington,
and people stop along the trail,
and they're hiking every day.
So you could have, every day,
another photo from the landscape.
I guess, maybe not many people are out hiking
during the shoulder season.
Well, but yet, is there anyone here
that represents Picture Post?
And I don't know what the status of that is.
That was a project out of UNH
where it was just the little post with six sides,
and you would set your cell phone down on a side
or all sides and take a picture and one picture facing up.
Right, and it would kind of give you
the six-side PhenoCam effect.
[Attendee] And I was a Picture Post person.
I have a Picture Post on my land,
and I literally couldn't keep up with it.
That's why I'm thinking, could it be on a heavy traffic area
where it's not one person (indistinct) maintaining that,
but it's literally anybody who walks by?
-Yeah. -Yeah, and I think
the challenge there goes back to some of our challenges,
which is who is taking the data and processing it
and making it useful?
I think that that's where Picture Post kind of,
it was more like, hey, come use our data,
but if there's nobody really doing it, I think you,
yep, so I think it's a great idea,
with permit issues aside,
but it's also about where does the data go,
and how does it get processed in a meaningful way?
[Attendee] Yeah, that's FEMC. (laughs)
It's gotta be an automated script, right?
When the QR code uploads the image,
it's automatically processed and added to the database.
[Attendee] Well, that was my aspirational,
there has to be some big data hub,
where I don't know how iNaturalist
might fit into data upload.
[Attendee] People can walk on trails
and literally just turn their cameras up,
straight up, and take a photo, and there's all-
[Attendee] But it's gotta be the same place every time.
[Attendee] Well, it's all geolocated.
You could have a random scattering,
as long as you can extract the environmental information
from that photo.
You can say a lot, especially if there's tons of photos.
Things kinda average out.
There are automated ways to detect canopy openness,
just penetrating through the canopy would be super helpful
and probably could be hosted on the iNaturalist platform
with some modifications, probably.
Probably something very aspirational, but possible.
[Attendee] We used that for the FEMC plots
for transparency data.
And I think the key is automating,
just being able to automate it,
so the pictures come in and are automatically done.
[Attendee] Yeah.
There'd probably be a ton that are crappy photos
that we couldn't do anything with,
but there'd be some that would be good.
So I don't know if anyone has ever used it, but,
what's the app called, the photo app?
Instagram, all those photos,
some of them, you can make public,
and they're geotagged, they're time tagged,
and there's places on the landscape
that people take photos from so frequently
that you could basically have that.
They just already publicly posted.
[Attendee] Influencer.
[Attendee] There's overlooks where every day,
-somebody's taking a photo. -That's true.
-Data mining. -Yeah, it's true,
you just have to mine the data.
It's already out there,
at least as long as the app has existed.
[Attendee] Does anyone use Reel?
Could use that.
[Georgia] Yeah, and that's how I realized iNaturalist
was gonna work, because I just looked,
what was organically being monitored there?
And you can see painted trillium
along the whole Appalachian Trail.
It's wonderful.
Yeah.
When you said data hub, I did think of this one slide
that I didn't share at the end.
So we did have NASA funding a few years ago
to make this APIS, Advanced Phenology Information System.
So it took, is there a website here?
I'll try to stick it in the chat
or the notes that go out from this at the end.
But there's, so you can, for your location,
see where the in situ data is and the PhenoCam data
and your MODIS pixel.
And so it's supposed to facilitate getting that data
and intercomparing it.
But it's not the level of automation
that I think is being dreamed of in this session.
But just to say that there's a little bit of foundation
in that direction.
Cool, what other dreams?
Could we underline automating analysis,
'cause that's really the door-opener to a lot of this.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say too,
we could talk to the, I mean, PhenoCam,
I think, has done a really nice job of automating.
When you go look at a PhenoCam thing,
you see the greenness values.
So just talking to them about that process,
I think, is good.
And then there's of course the part you can't automate,
right, like the question and the interpretation,
and that requires thinking.
But I think we're talking about the automating,
extracting the metrics, like the start of season
or something like that.
[Attendee] Is this the kind of thing
where the more data, the better?
Or do you kind of level off,
reach a threshold where you have your answer?
Yeah.
[Attendee] I don't think having more data
is inherently detrimental to you.
I think there could be a possibility
of wasting effort at a certain point,
and that's the worst thing I think of.
So it all depends on your appetite
or amount of work you wanna put in.
[Attendee] At some point,
you're just reducing your error bars.
Where are we trying to get to?
[Attendee] I think there's so much variability
across the landscape
that you might reduce the error bars in one place,
but there's still so many other places
that may be responding differently.
[Attendee] Right, and it's over time,
so every time you take data, that's (indistinct).
[Attendee] I think the question
is you don't want bad data, right,
so you have to kinda cut it off, well, one is just effort,
return on investment, but the other is data quality.
[Attendee] So it really is a monitoring effort.
You can't have your question answered.
[Attendee] There's not an answer. (laughs)
I mean, yeah, I think if the question is,
how is climate change affecting plant phenology?
Even if your question is that broad,
I feel like that does just really go on and on
because climate change continues to happen,
and there's so much variation between years,
and there's so much variation
between species and landscapes.
Yeah, but I think one of the questions
that Georgia threw out there, using phenology information
for conservation planning or deciding where to protect land,
I feel like that could be more concrete
and end at some point.
We have enough information to make this decision
about this land acquisition, and so we're done.
So just those are my thoughts there.
[Attendee] Also, it might be helpful to have,
in this area, we need this question answered,
so we need to collect this type of data,
really having explicit.
That's what we really try to do
with these local phenology projects
is constrain and be like, you wanna know,
is our understory forbs,
are invasive understory forbs getting the edge on natives,
and we're gonna collect this data on these species
for this period of time and get that grip.
But a lot of partners,
ones on the call like Kerissa and Georgia,
do wanna know, what's the climate change story?
What are the trends?
And so that does mean sort of open-ended,
ongoing data collection, which I know they're committed to,
but it's also challenging.
[Georgia] Yeah, and one of the things
that keeps coming up for me
is the who cares question too.
I think that phenology,
and NPN has done a great job of this,
is making sure that this is front of mind of the public.
And I do think that phenology is a natural way
to broach the climate change issue.
So I think maybe it's not aspirational,
but it's making sure that we continue
to maintain connecting the so what question
to the broader public of why we're doing this work.
Somehow, yeah, I'm not sure where it goes,
but I think it's really important.
[Attendee] Yeah, I totally agree.
And the way that I would spin that is thinking about,
well, what are the implications?
And so I think about sort of cascading impacts
of changing phenology, especially for migrating species.
How might changes in phenology and plants
affect insect populations, affect avian populations,
and so on, so forth?
So again, it's back to the
how do you then use this information,
and who do you pull in?
That would be a totally different working session
of what do we do with this information?
But I do think that that's one of the applications
that we have to be thinking about is it's not just,
oh, look, climate is changing, but it's the,
what does that mean in terms of ecosystem function
or ecosystem services?
Yeah.
[Georgia] Yeah.
The ecosystem services piece is really important
from both the making sure that people
that think just about the economics are,
but using it in that application
is really important, I think.
Yeah, for sure.
So I guess I'm thinking
a bit about the next steps
in terms of getting people together.
I don't know if, Alana, in the room and on the chat,
if you wanna just put,
make sure your name and email is down
if you would be interested in attending
and/or helping co-organize a meeting
in the next year
to go a little further and really draw out,
I mean, I have probably enough network, well, I don't know,
I feel reasonably well-positioned
to pull out some people who aren't here,
in terms of especially the remote sensing and PhenoCam
and some of the audio monitoring folks.
So yeah, anyways, sorry.
But yes, just getting,
if you're on the Teams meeting, and you're interested,
put your name and email in the chat, and I'll gather that,
and Alana can gather in the room.
And then, yeah, I guess if we missed any
dreams that you have, throw them in now or email us.
And then, yeah, I don't know-
Maybe who are interested can put their emails
next to their names on the sign-in sheet.
I think I just wanted to,
I feel obligated to make a, touch on,
we're at the FEMC conference.
There is a lot of resources or just,
I think FEMC really kind of brings us all together,
so there are opportunities I wanna mention.
It wouldn't allow for overlap,
but utilizing the FEMC data archive,
you can at least, you could search
through the data archive phenology, you could see studies.
So if we could start populating that,
it's at least a start that it can be, archive,
but I mean, that could be one place
that we could start populating even some of these unknown,
lesser-known phenology monitoring efforts,
and we can really start seeing where the gaps
or the overlaps are.
And again, this isn't really,
maybe so much wouldn't inspire
a regionwide monitoring effort,
but I do wanna make mention
of the Ecosystem Monitoring Fund.
There is a priority for
improving monitoring projects or starting new projects,
especially with an emphasis on a regionwide scale.
So just remember the resources that we have through FEMC.
Thanks for that.
Yeah, and I think some of the folks
that came in through me and through NPN
might not know as much about FEMC and those resources.
So we'll just make sure to sort of share out.
So that's both a portal where people can connect
and also a data, what else is there?
There's funding as well, is that right?
Yeah, the Ecosystem Monitoring Fund
is a small grant program that happens annually,
funded by FEMC, usually in the spring. (indistinct)
Awesome.
We have five minutes, if anybody has any burning thoughts
that they didn't get to share.
[Attendee] I'll just say thank you for organizing
and running this.
I think this is a really important conversation.
I think a lot of people are interested in it,
but it just seems kind of so big.
It's the how do you tackle it?
So I would say let's keep the conversations going.
This is fabulous.
Thank you.
Thank you all for attending, and thank you to Alyssa,
'cause she's put in so much work towards it.
I appreciate it.
Oh, thank you.
I really wish I could've been there in person.
(group clapping)
Wonderful to be here with you all.
And I feel like there is a lot of enthusiasm.
And even the challenges, right,
they're just really eyes open, right?
Nobody would go into this naively.
We know what the challenges are, and that's really,
I find that really encouraging.
So there is gonna be a proceedings
that will be published from that output set
from this working session, and now we have all the emails.
We can share the proceedings and share some updates,
maybe some things that are on the horizon.
-Great. -Thank you.
I think we're done, right?
Good job, everybody.
Thank you.