By leveraging millions of time-stamped observations, researchers can identify plant rhythms and ecological patterns year-round.
By leveraging millions of time-stamped observations, researchers can identify plant rhythms and ecological patterns year-round.
Leipzig. A research team led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Leipzig University has developed an algorithm that analyses observational data from the Flora Incognita app. The novel approach described in Methods in Ecology and Evolution can be used to derive ecological patterns that could provide valuable information about the effects of climate change on plants.
Plants are known to respond to seasonal changes by budding, leafing, and flowering. As climate change stands to shift these so-called phenological stages in the life cycle of plants, access to data about phenological changes – from many different locations and in different plants – can be used to draw conclusions about the actual effects of climate change. However, conducting such analyses require a large amount of data and data collection of this scale would be unthinkable without the help of citizen scientists. “The problem is that the quality of the data suffers when fewer people engage as citizen scientists and stop collecting data,” says first author Karin Mora, research fellow at Leipzig University and iDiv.
Read more at: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research
The Flora Incognita app makes it easy to identify plants with a smartphone. (Photo Credit: Flora Incognita)
