What A Citizen Scientist Phenologist Does
Posted in Behind the Scenes, Science on September 13th, 2011 by Sandy Wolkenberg – 1 CommentEd. note: Sandy Wolkenberg is a Citizen Scientist who has been working in the Thain Family Forest for three and a half years. Over the course of a week on Plant Talk, Sandy will share a five-part series of posts on The New York Botanical Garden’s Citizen Scientist Tree Phenology Program. If Sandy’s experiences motivate you to want to know more about becoming a Citizen Scientist, check out the Garden’s Volunteer Program page.
As volunteer phenologists, we are tasked with observing and entering data on ten different trees in the Thain Family Forest, usually two or three trees on each of the three Forest trails: The Spicebush, Ridge, and Bridge Trails. We monitor these trees weekly for three seasons, winter being the exception. It was all very new and a little intimidating. Sometimes even finding the trees can be daunting after spring leaves reach full size and each tree’s marker becomes obscured. Each tree in the Citizen Scientist Tree Phenology program is marked with a tag about 6 feet from the ground–these tags correspond to the tree’s numbers on the data entry sheets.
So here, come and meet tree #95, Acer rubrum, the Red Maple:
