Interview with Dr. Abe Miller-Rushing, Part II

October 18th, 2011

This is Part II of our interview with Dr. Abe Miller-Rushing, Science Coordinator for Acadia National Park and Schoodic Education and Research Center.  If you missed Part I, you can still find it in the News & Notes archive in the lower right navigation bar on this page.  

This interview marks the first in our series of interviews with phenology, climate science, education and other experts.  Abe is the former Assistant Director, and one of the founding scientists, for the USA-National Phenology Network, which houses the data collected by Signs of the Seasons (SOS) volunteers.  

In Part II, Abe talks about the connections between phenology and climate research, the value of citizen science data collection initiatives, legacy data sets held by public agencies, and he offers other insights and words of encouragement to Signs of the Seasons volunteers.

Q: Talk about the connections to climate science of phenology studies and data collection.  Do you have a sense of how much the data have been used so far by researchers to look at climate change?

A: The data collected by the USA-NPN [USA-National Phenology Network] are probably only just starting to be used by the climate science community, in part because the data set is just now starting to mature and climate scientists are becoming increasingly aware of USA-NPN.  But also they’re more aware of phenology data more broadly, for example the remotely sensed data collected by satellites about timing of “green-up” in spring and “brown-down” in fall, which have been linked to climate.  So they’re looking at how climate is influencing the timing of those events and how those influence the climate. There’s a two-way interaction between phenology and the climate system.

Q: When you talk about the data “maturing”, what do you mean?

A: In terms of quantity and in terms of methods used.  There were early versions of the database and it’s changed quite a bit.  For two years now there’ve been pretty consistent methods used that yield the most useful kind of data. The focus now is on increasing  the number of people making observations, which will increase the utility to scientists, ecologists, managers, and climate scientists.  But it is getting used.  NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] is looking at pollen release by junipers, in order to create early warning systems about allergens for medical professionals, pharmacists and individuals about when allergy season will come.  Also there are projects looking at the role of phenology in invasiveness of plant species.

Q:  Where do you see the value in citizen science phenology projects?  There’s a lot more citizen science going on now than there was 15 years ago, and it seems more recognized as being valuable.  What are your thoughts on that?  How would it be different to have paid staff at agencies collecting the data vs. volunteers in general?

A:   From the scientist’s perspective, one of the main benefits of citizen science is that there’s the potential to dramatically increase the amount of data and observations they can use to analyze how things are changing and what’s driving those changes.  The more information we have the better our answers to those questions will be.

Phenology works well for citizen science for a number of reasons.  In Maine, in late winter-early spring we’re watching very closely for when the snow melts, and when those first plants pop up in our garden, and when leaves start coming out and insects emerge, and in fall, when the leaves start falling. Because people already make those observations, it’s just one more step to ask them to write them down. And there are other reasons that phenology is nice—in the field of climate change, there’s not a lot of good information about impacts of climate change in a given location.  Most people couldn’t tell you what’s changed in their back yard as a result of climate change.  By making these observations about bird arrival dates and so on, they can give you an example of what’s changing or not changing.  Also it helps get people engaged in science, being part of the process.

For scientists it’s also great because phenology has long been understudied in ecology.  People have spent a lot of time thinking about spatial relationships, but relatively little time thinking about how things vary over time.  Phenology is about the study of how changes in timing might affect interactions between species; the crops we grow, or our vacation plans; our economy or our health, through the timing of mosquitoes or allergy seasons.  Phenology works as a citizen science effort because it’s important to science and because it’s a good communications tool.  It tells us about our daily lives, things that affect us.

It’s also much cheaper to do it through citizen science, and it gives us the ability to understand what’s happening in a lot more places. We can get a much better picture of what’s going on in all types of landscapes across the country.

Q: Are the protocols that have been set up by the USA-NPN standard?  That is, are they the same ones used by LTER sites (the Long-term Ecological Research network is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded program of sites across the country) that are doing their own phenology research?

A:  Yes, USA-NPN is a consortium of a lot of different organizations.  The LTER network is using USA-NPN methods, by and large.  Some have been using alternate methods, some are using combined methods.  The USA-NPN methods were developed to be as meaningful as possible at the same time as using the most commonly used historical methods, such as those Thoreau used, and the historical lilac network throughout the country.  It’s compatible with some of the common methods used in Europe and East Asia.  So we would be able to compare results collected by different phenology networks in the world.

Q:  I was just curious if there was any debate over the methods and protocols or whether they’re acceptable to most scientists.

A:  No there isn’t.  NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, a new NSF-funded program, will also be using USA-NPN methods, and the National Park Service [NPS] and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [USFWS] will be using USA-NPN methods.  We worked closely with state and federal agencies to make sure the methods met their needs and were as robust as possible, while at the same time being do-able for kindergarteners!  It’s kind of amazing that you can do that, but it can be done.

Q:  What about other legacy data sources that are out there?  Have you looked at those or is anyone else considering mining those data held in federal and state agencies?

A: I think that there’s so much it’s almost paralyzing.  One set that USA-NPN has started working on is from 1880 – 1970 called the North American Bird Phenology Program that was making observations about bird arrival dates across the continent.  Those data were collected on index-sized cards and there are six million of them now residing in card catalogs at the [U.S. Geological Survey--USGS] Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.   They were in a leaky room for a long time, in danger of being destroyed, and Sam Droege, a USGS employee, recognized their value and led an effort to try to preserve them.  Now USA-NPN has taken on that effort.  They’re scanning these cards and putting them online so volunteers online can transcribe them.  This process is double-checked and then the data go into a database.  There are other data sets like that—a whole lot of fisheries observations and game species breeding season data.  Agricultural departments would have data sets about agricultural species and pest species, both forest and crop pests.  It turns out a lot of hydroelectric dams track fish species.  There are lots of these data sets.  For people just coming into this field there’s going to be a lot of low-hanging fruit for a long time.  The field is still young and growing.

Q:  If they can get the funds to mine the data and transfer it into a digital format, though, right?  How hard is it to do that?

A:  There are some, mostly poorly funded, programs within most of the federal agencies to rescue historical datasets.   If you can show some current utility for them you can sometimes get funding for it.  People are increasingly recognizing the value of these data sets because our world is changing.  There’s acid rain, invasive species, land development and habitat fragmentation, and these historical datasets are invaluable for increasing our understanding of how those changes are impacting plants and animals on the landscape.

Q:  Is there anything else that you think our volunteer base would be interested to know or that you’d like them to think about in making their contributions to this effort?

A:  One thing is we still don’t know how most species are changing in most places.  We don’t know when most species of plants are flowering in a given year and how that’s changing.  We don’t know when most species of animals are breeding in any given year and how that’s changing, or how those species are interacting.  We know that a lot of those things are changing and that those changes will have big impacts on plants and animals, on ecosystem services, on agriculture, on human and wildlife health, on recreation and the economy, but right now it’s very difficult to predict those things.  So the observations volunteers are making for SOS and other similar programs across the country will be contributing important data to our understanding of those changes and what the implications will be to plants, animals and people in the future.  That’s one of the really important things.  Despite what we don’t know, we know that things are changing and they’ll have big impacts.  We need to know more to make the best decisions possible and that’s where a lot of the contributions will be made.

I would also encourage people to identify local problems that we could be solving with these data.  Maybe at the town or state level that people could rally around.  Volunteers could be thinking about issues that they’re interested in finding solutions for so they’re not just contributing to Acadia National Park’s ideas of what we think the problems are or IFW’s [Maine Inland Fish and Wildlife] ideas, but a schoolteacher and students could be thinking about, “How does phenology affect us?  We want to know more about it personally and at the same time be contributing to science more broadly.”  That’s something we should seize on.  I think people just want to help and this work offers opportunities to do that in many ways and on many levels.  People can decide at what level they want to be involved.

Posted in News