Hello all, it’s been a while since my last post! For today’s phenology blog, I’ll be discussing my data collection for the class-wide NR1020 phenology walk. My assigned day for data collection was April 21st. Tomorrow is Earth Day and also my birthday, so I had a pretty joyous time taking a walk and observing the phenological changes happening here around campus, as it really got me in the mood to appreciate nature! The trees I observed today were part of UVM’s phenology site on Nature’s Notebook. The group of trees included a Red Oak, a Sugar Maple, a White Oak, a Red Maple, and a Norway Maple.
The weather was quite chilly, with pretty large wind gusts and cooler temperatures. It had rained just a tiny bit earlier in the day, so the conditions were kind of wet. One of the commonalities I noticed when observing the five trees is that they all have visible buds. However, not all of the buds have necessarily bloomed yet. Out of 5 trees, the Sugar Maple, Norway Maple, and Red Maple had blooming buds. The Red Maple had actually begun to flower! I’ll include a photo of that below.
Based on today’s observations, I can infer that the trees are not all in the same phenophase, but are on their way to blooming for the spring. While observing, I was wondering how the sporadic warm and cold weather has affected the blooming of these trees. It was definitely interesting to see how the Red Maple had already flowered while the other trees were hardly breaking buds. I thoroughly enjoyed being familiar enough with different types of buds that I could tell my friends which trees were which based on their budding patterns (always nice to flex my knowledge a little bit 💪).
For this assignment, I submitted my observation data on the USA National Phenology Network. After my submission, I took some time to explore the website and found some super cool resources that I will definitely reference in the future! Some of the cool features of NPN are its ‘Pheno Forecasts,’ which estimate when key species will reach important life cycle stages, helping guide agriculture and natural resource management. I have never really used a website like NPN besides iNaturalist, so it was really cool to navigate a new platform and get familiar with its tools 😎
Alright, that’s it for now. Until next time!