The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN; www.usanpn.org) serves science and society by promoting a broad understanding of plant and animal phenology and the relationships among phenological patterns, climate, and environmental change. Data collected by citizen and professional scientists through Nature’s Notebook -- a national-scale, multi-taxa phenology observation program -- serve USA-NPN strategic goals of advancing science and informing decisions. Since 2009 over 8,800 Nature’s Notebook participants have contributed over 9 million observation records of plants and animals across the United States to the National Phenology Database. These phenology data and resultant products are being used in a rapidly growing number of applications for science, conservation and resource management, including 24 peer-reviewed publications to date. Here we describe recent advances in the production and delivery of phenology data products derived from in-situ organismal data.
Results/Conclusions
In this talk we will describe the new “Phenology Observation Portal” tool used by USA-NPN to deliver three types of user-customized datasets: (a) Status and Intensity Data, (b) Individual Phenometrics, and (c) Site Phenometrics. We will discuss advances in the delivery and analysis of a broad range of phenological metrics derived from observational data at multiple scales including phenophase onset, peak, and end dates, as well as duration and periodicity. In addition, we will demonstrate a new functionality within the USA-NPN Visualization Tool to generate temporal activity curves that can be used to investigate the shape of phenological behavior and the intra-annual overlap in activity between interacting taxa (e.g. plants and pollinators). Finally, we present an overview of the framework we use to ensure data are of high quality. These data can be used for a variety of applications, from predictive phenological model development to validation of remote sensing products. We invite researchers and partners to explore these data (www.usanpn.org/data) to address a wide range of science questions and management needs.