News & Publications

In 2018, we commemorated 10 years of the USA National Phenology Network and data collection with Nature's Notebook. 

On October 19th, we brought together USA-NPN partners and Nature's Notebook leaders and observers at the home of the USA-NPN's National Coordinating Office in Tucson. There we reflected on the last 10 years of the USA-NPN and envisioned the next 10 years. 

We know that the timing of spring is changing. What does that mean for migratory birds?

It is with heavy hearts that we tell you of a great loss to the USA National Phenology Network. In May 2018 we lost Patty Guertin, our staff botanist who had been with us since the start of the USA-NPN. Taken from the world by cancer far too soon, she is sorely missed by her family, friends, and the coworkers who consider her family. 

By Groundhog day in 2017, spring had arrived 3-4 weeks early across much of the Southeast. This year, it looks like we will not see a very early spring in the Southeast. However, we predict that by Groundhog day this year, spring will have spread even further into Southwest states this year than last.

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.