The Water Edition, a phenology journal

Because timing is everything! Living beings are only able to survive and reproduce when climatic conditions are suitable for all stages of their life cycles.

Phenology includes countless environmental processes that are important for life as we know it. For example, phenology helps us understand pollination, food availability, allergies, length of the growing season, abundance of insects, disease risks (e.g., tick and mosquito season), and much more. Phenology helps us see how these essential processes occur and exhibit sensitivity to climate. The better we’re able to understand this, the more we can anticipate and plan for consequences.

No. All you need are your senses, time, and a way to remember or record what you see outdoors, like a pencil and journal. Optional tools include field guides, binoculars or a hand lens, art supplies, and apps like iNaturalist and Nature’s Notebook.

The "backyard" is everyday and common. It’s also ever-changing and worthy of attention. Whether literal or figurative, the “backyard” sustains you, affects you, and connects you to community. It’s where you have influence and take action.

Free phenology workshops are available from the University of Minnesota.

No, Backyard Phenology is not what most people mean by the phrase participatory science.

Depending on your own path of learning, Backyard Phenology might lead you to participatory science. If you want to participate in broad-based, shared scientific research, projects like eBird, iNaturalist, and Nature’s Notebook are excellent ways to contribute.

Even though your journal is just for you, it connects you to something bigger. When you journal, you become part of shared knowledge-making focused on the places where we live, how these places change, and how noticing change transforms us. We invite you to explore phenology through many ways of knowing, science being one among them.

On the surface, it can feel like seasonal changes always have and always will happen in a familiar way. However, the timing of biological activity is changeable, interlinked, sensitive to and dependent on the environment. There is a critical need to understand how plants and animals respond to a warmer and more variable climate. Phenologists investigate the biological signals and consequences of climate change.

Absolutely. Phenology is enmeshed with climate and climate change because all life depends on factors like moisture and temperature to survive and reproduce.

Minnesota’s climate is becoming wetter and hotter. Minnesota’s temperatures have risen ~2 degrees F over the last 50 years and are projected to rise ~7–9 degrees F by the end of the century due to human-caused climate change. Minnesota’s earlier springs, longer growing seasons, new snowfall patterns, shallower frosts, and many other changes have observable effects on plants, animals, and other lifeforms. Zooming out to the global picture, phenology has emerged over the last several decades to become one of the most coherent signals of our changing climate. 

The effects of climate change on phenology are difficult to generalize. That is to say, because we live in a biodiverse world, different kinds of organisms living in different places respond to climate change in different ways. Even though predicting changing phenology and its consequences is difficult, it is critically important as part of understanding how Earth supports life.

Because science is done with others rather than wholly alone, the first step is considering your science community and how they make sense of the information they gather, store, and share. The science community generally agree that complete phenology observations include these four pieces of information:

1. Place
2. Timing
3. What kind of living being are you observing?
4. What is changing?

The sections below help you gather these kinds of information, preparing you to join conversations about phenology science.

Use place names that help people know where your observations happened. Examples include physical addresses, street intersections and boundaries, and latitude-longitude coordinates. The more specific your place is, the more meaningful your observations are to the science community. For example, specify a garden lot, a yard, or a bus stop instead of larger areas like neighborhoods, cities, and counties. Finally, choosing a place you visit frequently throughout the year will help you develop your own knowledge base and sense of scientific inquiry.

Record the date and year for every observation. This helps people in your community put your observations in context in terms of seasonal timing, year to year variations, and trends over time.

Writing down the time of day and weather conditions is optional. Some people capture these details as a way to reinforce and recall their own memories. When the science community needs weather conditions to make sense of phenology observations, they generally get that information from other sources, such as the National Weather Service. (They do this by referencing the place and time for each phenology observation, which helps explain why it is important to capture those pieces of information in a specific, detailed way.)

The phenology science community observes all kinds of beings who live outdoors in the elements. (However, they generally do not observe pets, house plants, and other life that does not depend on climatic conditions.) Do your best to identify the plant, animal, fungus, or other being that you observe. Identification help is available in field guides, or by uploading images to iNaturalist, a free app that suggests identifications through community interactions and computer vision.

Naming what you see:

Common names: Use specific names (e.g., gray squirrel, bur oak, and walleye) to help people understand what you’ve seen. When specific names are not available, use broad group names (e.g., mammal, tree, and fish) and then add detail with sketches and descriptive notes.

Scientific names: The scientific community has a convention of assigning Latin names to every kind of organism. Using scientific names improves communication because the names are broadly agreed-upon and contain clues about how organisms are related to one another.

Original names: In Minnesota, the Dakota and Anishinaabe were among the earliest people to know the names and phenology of plants, animals, fungi, and other beings. Original names are still in use by Indigenous language keepers.

FOR PLANTS, describe or draw which parts (buds, leaves, flowers, fruits, etc.) are changing and how (in color, size, shape, etc.).

FOR ANIMALS, describe their life stage (e.g., adult, egg, larva, chick, pup, etc.), the foods they eat, sounds they make, and interactions with their environment. 

Because life is diverse and biological activity is complex, the answers to this question come in an astonishing variety. The USA National Phenology Network is a community that helps people understand and use standard definitions and methods in phenological research. USA-NPN currently has standards for 1,882 species of plants and animals.