Earth observations from a variety of platforms and across a range of scales are required to support research, natural resource management, and policy- and decision-making in a changing world. The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN; www.usanpn.org) is a national-scale science and monitoring initiative focused on collecting, organizing and delivering phenological data to better understand the response of biodiversity to environmental variation and change. USA-NPN provides a hierarchical, national monitoring framework that enables other organizations to leverage the capacity of the Network for their own applications - minimizing investment and duplication of effort - while promoting interoperability and sustainability. Specific capacity includes a comprehensive, web-based phenology monitoring program, Nature’s Notebook; standardized observation protocols; flexible data collection and management systems; online data exploration, visualization and analysis tools, and customizable data access, including raw and summarized phenological and bioclimatological data. Over the last year, we developed a workflow for the production and validation of spatially gridded phenology products based on models that couple in-situ organismal data (e.g., collected through Nature’s Notebook) with meteorological data.
Results/Conclusions
Gridded bioclimatic data products -- including accumulated growing degree days (AGDD) and a suite of Spring Indices (SI), as well as their anomalies – are now available for the nation at daily time-steps and at spatial granularities ranging from kilometers to degrees. AGDD and SI can be viewed alone or with in-situ plant or animal phenology observation data using the online USA-NPN Visualization Tool. AGDD and SI are also available as WMS (maps such as .png, .gif, .pdf) and as WCS (raster data such as GeoTiff, ArcGrid, NetCDF), which can be accessed using the USA-NPN Geoserver Request Builder tool. These gridded data products are now ripe for integration with other modeled or earth observation gridded data, e.g., indices of drought impact or land surface reflectance. This greatly broadens capacity to scale organismal observational data to landscapes and regions, and enables novel investigations of biophysical interactions at unprecedented scales, e.g., continental-scale migrations. We will highlight several recent applications of these new gridded products, with a focus on national-scale short-term ecological forecasting.