We had an exciting Fall at the National Coordinating Office as we continued to commemorate 10 years as a network and watched a number of great publications emerge that used USA-NPN data and products! For example, you can read below about how observational data were used to identify climate drivers of flowering and to validate land surface phenology, and how patterns in the onset of spring were evaluated using multiple climate data sources. There have been 13 studies using these data that have come out so far in 2018 to peruse for inspiration, including these on models, milkweeds, and white ash trees - all released in the past few days! 
 
You may have noticed that phenology and the Spring Indices were highlighted in the Fourth National Climate Assessment, showing it as important as ever that we continue documenting the patterns and drivers of seasonal change.  Please reach out if there is anything we can do to facilitate the important research you are doing. We are happy to collaborate with you on future activities to advance the science of phenology and work with stakeholders to deliver phenology information to inform natural resource management decisions and beyond. 

Happy holidays, and I look forward to interacting in the new year!


 
   
 
What's new at the USA National Phenology Network
15 million records!

We've just reached the milestone of 15 million records submitted to the National Phenology Database! These data are freely available to download or explore in the USA-NPN Visualization Tool. 

Read more »

Trevor Bloom, Nature Conservancy Phenology Scientist 
Phenology at AGU

It was great to see many of you at the AGU meeting last week where there was an abundance of presentations on phenology and seasonality! We had the opportunity to share the accomplishments and future vision of the USA-NPN, and to learn the latest in the fields of land surface phenology validation, climate drivers of phenology, and seasonal forecasting. 

See you next year in San Francisco! »
 
Data and data products
Pheno Forecasts: Sneak peek! 

I am excited to share with you that we will be releasing Pheno Forecast maps this spring for 8 additional species! We are adding new technical capacity to deliver these maps and expand the types of models we can operationalize. 

Stay tuned for maps of species based on models that accumulate heat from start dates that other than January 1st, like Eastern tent caterpillar , and for an invasive plant species, buffelgrass , that greens-up as a response to precipitation thresholds. 


Available dataset: Cornus florida
 
Did you know the USA-NPN houses many robust high quality datasets due to ongoing multi-year campaigns that target high priority species? Read below on one such effort and the resulting dataset,
and let us know if you think this could be of use for you in your research or applications!   
Opportunities
Submit to the Phenology session at EGU!

The EGU General Assembly will be held in Vienna, Austria from 7-12 Apr 2019.

We encourage you to consider contributing to the session Phenology and seasonality in climate change. This will be a great opportunity to interact with an international community of phenology scientists! Be sure to submit your abstract by January 10th, 2019!

Climate and Global Change Fellowship

Apply for a program that provides opportunities to do independent research. This innovative fellowship aims to train the next generation of climate leaders. Applications due January 4th, 2019. 

Mendenhall Research Fellowship Program    

Do you have interest in developing skills to bridge the gap between science and decision-making?  Apply for a post-doctoral opportunity within the U.S. Geological Survey to carry out critical work that can enable the production of user-inspired science. 


Research spotlight
Evaluation of VIIRS land surface phenology

A recent paper by Xiaoyang Zhang and colleagues published in Remote Sensing of the Environment generated a land surface phenology product derived from the VIIRS satellite time series.  The analyses showed that there was high agreement between VIIRS, MODIS, and Landsat derived phenology metrics as well as USA-NPN in-situ  observations.

Flowering onset predicted by climate drivers

A study published in Global Change Biology by Isaac Park and Susan Mazer leveraged vast phenological data extracted from herbaria. This work demonstrated how a broad array of climate parameters can be used to predict flowering in over 2000 taxa across large geographic space and time using a method called elastic net regularization. 

This research further used USA-NPN observational data to evaluate the predictive capacity of the models. 

Onset of spring is influenced by climate data

Mehdipoor and colleagues compared and evaluated multiple gridded Spring Index products in a recent paper in the International Journal of Climatology. This study generated spring maps based on Daymet and Gridmet climate data at multiple spatial resolutions and found differences in the patterns and rates of change of the timing of spring onset.  

Contact

 
Kathy Gerst
Associate Research Scientist
Data Product Coordinator
520-621-1740
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