University Place

Good afternoon, my name is Caleb Slemmons. I'm with the National Ecological Observatory Network. I am a field biologist located out of our regional office located up in northern Wisconsin near Land O'Lakes where it snows everyday and including today. I was asked to come down and talk a little bit about Project BudBurst. My background isn't specifically in education and outreach but I've worked a little bit in that arena and so the title of my talk today is the National Citizen Science Network Project BudBurst. We talked a little bit about citizen science on the water John told us about citizen science in the sky so now I'm going to talk a little bit about citizen science on the ground. And terra ferma-- that's that stuff between the lakes that you drive and walk on. I'm gonna start off my presentation with a little bit of an overview of what NEON is. I'm gonna go ahead and jump right into that. NEON is the first of its kind-- nationwide research network. It's focused on providing high quality ecology data by collecting data utilizing consistent instrumentation and methods. It's wholly funded by the National Science Foundation and it's poised to collect valuable longterm data sets over the next 30 years to help scientists, resource managers, policy makers and others make critical decisions about our natural resources into the future. The network is currently in construction and comprised of 20 different regions or ecoclimatic domains that are spread throughout the United States, Porto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii. This geospatial design will allow the development of future spatially explicit models in each of these regions. The Great Lakes Domain which includes northern Wisconsin is the office that I work out of. I'm a plant ecologist by trade and some of the work that I do is related generally speaking with the methods used in Project BudBurst. We began sampling in 2014. We have three terrestrial sampling sites. One is located near Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin. Two other terrestrial sites are located near Tomahawk with an additional study site west of Tomahawk in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. And we also have one aquatic site and that's Crampton lake located on the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center our campus also near Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin. The NEON project-- just to give you some more familiarity about the project. It's first of all a network of automated sensors. There's a terrestrial instrument system. These are tower and soil array mounted sensor things such as solar radiation sensors, wind, speed and direction, temperature eventually gas exchange in gas flux and those are-- You can see in the picture on the left hand of the slide there that's our site at the university in Notre Dame ERC that was instrumented in 2014 with some initial instrumentation. The second component associated with the utilization of automated sensors is known as the Airborne Observatory. We will have annual overflights utilizing fixed-wing aircraft that will overfly each of our research study areas and be collecting LIDAR data, high resolution imaging and high perspectral imaging. And we're gonna be having our first overflight of the Great Lakes Region sites this summer. And then for aquatic states we also have a component and battery of different instrumentation that will be deployed on our lake sites both bowie mounted and meteorological stations on the shoreline as well as ground water monitoring wells and sensors. That's kind of the automated side. We also do on the ground sampling and that on the ground sampling is more of the traditional ecological sampling and measurements including emphasis on certain taxa which are described as sentinal taxa. These are taxa that are particularly sensitive to environmental change. I don't have time to go into much detail here but I'll point out again that one relevant area we do collect data on plant phenology or pet plant life cycle at our research sites. And then we also do not on the ground but on the water sampling for aquatics. This includes a variety of diverse taxa and also measurements of ground and surface water chemistry. I wanna shift gears here a little bit and talk about-- That's a background on the general overview of the science portion of the NEON project. I don't have a lot of time to go into the real specifics but I would encourage you to go on to our website and learn more about it neonscience.org. But NEON was designed also as a resource. It was designed to enable understanding and forecasting the effects of climate change, land use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology by providing first of all physical infrastructure and also an information infrastructure to distribute those data. But also importantly NEON was created as an educational resource for the community with programs and tools for engaging communities in scientific discovery. And Project BudBurst is one of the foremost and most popular education and outreach projects that NEON administers. Project BudBurst is basically in a nutshell a plant phenology citizen science program and I'll talk a little bit about what that means more specifically but it began in 2007 as a project that's co-managed by NEON and the Chicago Botanic Gardern. It's really easy to contribute to the project I think that that's one of the things that's led to its success. It includes individuals from all walks of life. We've had participants from all 50 US states contribute and NEON has also leveraged the power of patnerships by working with numerous federal agencies and local organizations. Just to get a little bit of terminology out of the way here. What is phenology? What are we talking about when we're talking about phenology? Phenology is basically about life cycles of living organisms. The timing of those life cycles such as birds migrating in the fall and nesting in the spring. Plants also have distinct life cycles that can be observed and those are timed in accordance with local environmental factors such as day length and temperature. Wisconsin native and conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold tracked phenology of both birds and plants in Sauk and Dane counties from 1938 to 1948. Another bit of terminology is a phenophase these are visually identifiable distinct phases. As an example here this is a red osier dogwood and one phenophase would be the bud break in the spring. Later on a flower development as seen kinda near the middle of this picture. Fruit development, color change in the leaves and ultimately leaf drop. Each one of these are considered phenophases. I mentioned that Project BudBurst is a national network of citizen science. As I said it began in 2007. It's been highly popular. The basic steps of it are that people can observe plants in their local region they can record the observations of different dates that these phenophases occur and then folks log on to the website and submit their findings. Last year in 2015 there was over 17,000 records that were submitted by citizen scientists all over the United States including 415 excuse me 417 from Wiscconsin as is seen in the inset map there. I'm just gonna kind of briefly walk through how you would log on to the website and how you contribute to Project BudBurst. As I said before it's very easy to do really all you need is a computer with Internet access. It helps to have a printer to print out some data forms. If you are not particularly technically savy or something like that ask your grandkids for help. (laughter) You're gonna go on you're gonna register. you fill out some basic information about yourself. You go through some learning modules about how you are going to observe these different phenophases and record them. After you've done that you're gonna select a plant. And you can search by state, you can search by the most popular plant species or by species name if you have one in mind. The current species list includes over 280 plants including lots of widespread native and non-native species. Many of the species that are on the list can be found in your backyard already, so things like forsythia-- you may not need to go any further than your own backyard to contribute. There's two options in terms of once you've selected a plant. You can either fill out or choose to do a regular report or a single report. Regular reporting would be if you wanna track the phenophases throughout the year and single report would be if you just had a single observation that you wanted to do. Lots of flexibility-- you can do it on a longer time-scale. You can do it just kind of here and there for individual plants and observations. This shows what the data forms would look like that you'd print out. You can see the regular reports on the right hand side my right hand your left that has photos of the different phenophases where you'd enter in the dates and then on the right hand side here the single report as well. After you have found a plant and observed the plant written down the dates that you saw some of these different phenophases occurring you're then ready to go on and report your observations. The first thing that you'll do is you will register a location on the website. This is a spatially explicit project so where you do the monitoring's pretty important. There's a Google map that's included in there so you can enter a specific address or a public park. Once you get that location entered it will pre-populate the coordinates into the form. You will answer a couple of quick questions. And then you're ready to go ahead and enter in the dates that you observed various phenophases occurring. When you're done with that you just click submit. The data is automatically updated to the publicly available database and that's updated on in realtime so you can go on at any time and see observations that people are making all over the country both in a map view as well as in a tabular format. That kind of takes me to-- I wanna mention at least a little bit about part of the reason that Project BudBurst has been so successful and people have been so interested in it is its ability to leverage different partners. NEON has worked with the National Park Service to deliver BudBurst at the parks. Also with the National Wildlife Refuges. Here in Wisconsin the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge is a Project BudBurst partner. And basically what that means is that visitors, volunteers and staff members of that organization are engaged in participating with Project BudBurst. In the same way community Project BudBurst--

including in Wisconsin

Mequon Nature Preserve and Riveredge Nature Center in Saukville-- are Project BudBurst community partners. Botanical garderns arboreta are also getting in on Project BudBurst. I think we've heard it quite a bit

but I'll say it again

It's important. The observations that citizen scientists make are critical. Increasingly scientists are finding ways to leverage these citizen science data sets. For Project BudBurst all of the data is available publicly through the website. We've had over 23,000 people participate since the beginning of the project. Lots of benefits both for the scientific community as well as the volunteers. I think that's important. And just a couple of examples here in ways that basically citizen science data is being utilized. On the left hand side here there's a publication utilizing Project BudBurst data to develop a model for predicting cherry blossom in Washington, DC and the Mid-Atlantic states. Project BudBurst data has also been used as seen in the publication on the right for along with the USDA PLANTS data to show that non-native invasive plant species are flowering and breaking bud earlier compared to the native species. The data is valuable. As I said it's increasingly being leveraged by the scientific community. I'm just gonna quickly talk about Season Spotter. Season Spotter is an additional and exciting citizen science opportunity. It's recently become available. It's a collaboration between NEON and several universities. Basically what this project is about is utilizing volunteers to classify automated imagery that's taken from what are known as phenocams. This map here shows what's known as the US phenocam network. These cameras were set up to take pictures of canopy phenology. What researchers found is that in trying to automate the process of classifying these images they found that the human eye is much better than a computer at classifying imagery. They launched a crowdsourcing program through Zooniverse and it's extremely simple to do this. One of the things I think that makes this very easy to contribute is that you don't have to register. You can go on and classify images for a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, a couple of years, whatever time you have available and I think this project has a lot of promise for the future. It's in its early development. There's lots of potential research applications in adding value essentially to these automated cameras and the images that they produce. There's been over 105,000 classifications, over 7,000 participants in the eight months that this project's been active. I encourage if you are interested go to zooniverse.org and look for the Season Spotter project. Thanks so much for your time. Again I appreciate all the efforts of citizen scientists everywhere and we'll be watching plant phenology in our research sites and hope that you're watching them in your own backyard. Thank you. (applause)