Patterns of phenology for plants and animals control ecosystem processes and affect food production, health, conservation, and recreation. Although phenological data and models have broad applications, until recently there was no coordinated effort to understand phenology at the national scale in the United States. The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN; www.usanpn.org) is an emerging and exciting partnership between federal agencies, the academic community, and the general public to establish a national initiative focused on phenology as a tool to understand how plants, animals and landscapes respond to climate variation and change.
Results/Conclusions
Data management and information sharing are central to the USA-NPN mission. The USA-NPN develops, implements, and maintains a comprehensive Information Management System (IMS) to serve the needs of the network, including the collection, storage and dissemination of phenology data, access to phenology-related information, tools for data interpretation, and communication among partners of the USA-NPN. The IMS includes components for data storage, such as the National Phenology Database (NPD), and several online user interfaces to accommodate data entry, data download, data visualization and catalog searches for phenology-related information. The IMS is governed by a set of standards to ensure security, privacy, data access, and data quality.
The National Phenology Database is designed to efficiently accommodate large quantities of phenology data, to be flexible to the changing needs of the network, and to provide for quality control. The database allows for the collection, storage and output of phenology data from multiple sources (e.g., partner organizations, researchers and citizen observers), as well as integration with legacy datasets. Several services will be created to provide access to the data, including reports, visualization interfaces, and web services. These services will provide integrated access to phenology and related information for scientists, decision-makers and general audiences.