The California Phenology Project
Since 2010, I have been Field Director of the California Phenology Project (CPP: www.usanpn.org/cpp), the only statewide program in the U.S. dedicated to tracking the effects of climate change on the phenological patterns of wild plants in National Parks, State Parks, Biological Field Stations, and botanical gardens . With a team of collaborators in the National Park Service and at UCSB, I designed and implemented phenological monitoring programs that continue to be run locally by national park staff and volunteers at state parks, private botanical gardens, and the UC Natural Reserve System. Among the participating national parks, more than 800 individual plants in 30 species have been georeferenced, mapped, and repeatedly visited to detect phenological transitions. As of June 2018, the California Phenology Project has contributed >1,450,000 phenological observations to the USA National Phenology Network’s database. These data are the focus of several research articles (Matthews and Mazer, 2015; Gerst et al., 2016; Park and Mazer, in review).