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)