I went on my phenology walk on April 13th with Allie Brown. This was just around the time when the weather was beginning to turn warmer and the flowers were preparing to bloom. Only some of the trees we saw were budding, most were still in the earliest stages of coming back to life. One tree, Tree #4, had about 40% of the buds flowering, although it was obvious they opened very recently. I noticed that the Maples were all still dormant.
When exploring the NPN Website, I came across an article titled “A more complete picture of the timing of spring.” This article went into detail on the current spring timelines and maps, and their common shortcoming, only showing the start of spring. Spring is not one event that can be marked by a single date, it is a collection of events that take weeks and/or months to play out. This is relevant to Vermont as, due to the changing climate, the speed at which these events occur in succession change just as the date of the beginning of spring does. To be more accurate, these maps could measure different events as markers, although this would take much more data to calculate, the kind of data we collected on this walk.