Backyard Gardeners Keep Tabs on Warming

Feb. 25, 2008 -- Climate scientists are now enlisting gardeners, students and any willing plant or flower lovers to watch for changing timing of spring blooms.

Project BudBurst allows people to enter their backyard spring leaf budding and bloom data into an online database that will help track the changing blooming times of specific types of plants.

Since plants are sensitive to temperature, the data will help track the advance of spring, which has been coming earlier in many places throughout North America. The project also collects historical plant data from gardeners who keep journals and have data from years past.

"This data is fed right into the National Phenology Network," said the project's coordinator, Sandra Henderson of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

Phenology is the science of tracking seasonal behaviors in plants and animals. It's an old science, with roots in ancient traditions that are tied to blossoming trees. In Japan and China, for instance, cherry and peach tree blooms signal the time of millennium-old festivals. Already it's been shown that Japan's cherry trees now bloom four days earlier than in the 1950s.

Similar warming trends are underway in North America, and the Project BudBurst will help fill in the details of how dozens of native species are adapting to global warming.

"We intend to collect data for several years," said Kayri Havens, director of plant sciences at the Chicago Botanic Garden, a partner in the project. That way changes in leaf budding and flower blooming ought to be seen over time.