Citizen scientists' notes pinpoint affects of climate change

[babylonsister]

* Posted on Sunday, February 8, 2009

Citizen scientists' notes pinpoint affects of climate change

By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON — It has to do with brown-headed cowbirds and clear-cut forests, lilacs and wildfires, vineyards in the Rhine Valley, marmots, dandelions, tadpoles, cherry trees around the Tidal Basin in Washington and musty old records stuffed in shoe boxes in people's closets and stacked on museum shelves.

As scientists track global warming, they're using sometimes centuries-old data to assess its impact on plants, animals, insects, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Increasingly, they're discovering that it can take only one seemingly insignificant change to disrupt an entire ecosystem.

"People talk about a 1- or 2-degree rise in temperature and it's inconsequential to us. Who cares?" said Greg Jones, an environmental studies professor at Southern Oregon University who's been studying wine grapes. "But in an ecosystem it can have dramatic effects."

As the study of phenology, or life cycles, attracts growing attention, researchers are turning more and more to citizen scientists for help.

Since 1954, more than 1,000 people nationwide have monitored lilacs, recording when they first develop leaves, buds and blossoms in a program that started in Montana and is now part of the National Phenology Network. The data now can be submitted online.

Another 3,500 or so people are monitoring 4,500 different plants as part of Project BudBurst, another online program. Eventually those involved in the project would like to have 40,000 people tracking plants, shrubs and trees from kinnikinick to chokecherry and wheat to Western columbine.

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/61702.html

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. It's 'Effects'...

This is what happens when the media lays off the editors to save a buck.

[tabatha]

2. He should know better.

Les Blumenthal, who writes for McClatchy's Washington state newspapers, has been a working journalist in Washington, D.C., for 19 years, first as the original Northwest regional writer for The Associated Press and since 1990 for the McClatchy Washington Bureau.