User Training Videos

1. Training Materials

1. Reporting Plant Observations

1. This mini-presentation will guide you through the steps of recording your observations of plants at your site. There is a separate training presentation for reporting animal observations at your site, however, many of the steps overlap. If you are observing both plants and animals at your site, you may wish to also view the presentation on reporting animal observations.

   This information is also available on USA-NPN website at www.usanpn.org.

 

1. In this presentation, we’ll focus reporting your observations online using Nature’s Notebook.

 

 

 

 

1. Enter a username and email address. You can use your email address as your username.

 

1. Then fill out the participant information – your name and address. All the fields marked with a red asterisk are required.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. This will bring you to your Nature’s Notebook home page. Using the navigation at the top, you can…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. When you ‘add a new site’ you…

 

 

 

 

 

1. Note the help icon on all of these pages.

 

1. We also encourage you to provide additional site information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Clicking either of these “Add or Edit Plants” buttons will take you to the “Add or Edit Plants” page.

 

 

 

 

1. and you’ll be offered suggested plant species with pictures. Click on one of the suggestions to select it.

 

 

1. Next, you are prompted to report on the…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Hovering over any of these Help icons will provide more information about this question.

 

1. For my red maple, I filled in the boxes with the appropriate information. My red maple is in…

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Once you’re finished entering information about your plant,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Clicking on the “create datasheet packet” button provided me with copies of a cover sheet and a phenophase datasheet for my red maple. If I had registered additional plants to this site, my packet would have also included phenophase datasheets for each of these plants. If I had registered animals, it would have included an Animal Checklist and phenophase datasheets for each of the animal species on my checklist.

 

1. Here is a copy of my datasheet for the red maple I just registered. Note that

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Use this datasheet to record your observations of the plant. We recommend taking both the datasheet and a print out of the full phenophase descriptions when you go outside. You may collect weeks or months of data on the datasheet and submit it all at once, or submit each day’s worth of observations online as you progress through the season. However, the sooner you enter your data online, the sooner you and others will see your data in our online visualization tools.

 

 

 

 

1. Once you’re ready to submit observations online,

 

 

1. You will be taken to the “Enter Observations” form.

 

 

1. You will be provided with the data entry table for this plant.

 

 

1. You can hover over the phenophase name (breaking leaf buds, for example) to review the detailed definition of the phenophase.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. If you did not check for a particular phenophase at all, do not click any of the choices and leave them all uncircled.

 

 

1. As an example, if I observe that my red maple is almost fully leafed out on this date, with no more breaking leaf buds,

 

1. I will click “N” for ‘breaking leaf buds’

 

1. And “Y” for leaves.

 

 

1. In this case, the canopy of my red maple is almost completely filled in with leaves, so I select ‘95% or more’.  If you hover over the blue information icon to the left of the menu, you will see more detailed information for the available options.

 

1. Most of the leaves on my red maple may have grown to their full size, and therefore are no longer increasing in size. But I am not completely sure of this,

 

1. so I click “?”.  The next time I make my observations, I will see if they get any larger.  If they do, then I will come back to this date column and click “Y” for this phenophase to report that they were indeed still increasing in size, and resubmit my observation for this date.  If they are not any larger on my next observation, I can come back to this date column and click “N” for this phenophase because they had already stopped increasing in size on this date.

 

1. I do not see any leaves with late season color

 

1. Or falling leaves, so I click “N” for both. If you click “N” for a phenophase, do not select any intensity measure from the “What value?” menu for that phenophase.

 

1. I do not see flowers

 

1. So click “N” for all of the flower phenophases.

 

1. And I see no fruits, so click “N” for ‘fruits’ and ‘ripe fruits’.  Since I saw no fruits on my red maple at my last visit

 

1. I also click “N” for ‘recent fruit drop’

 

 

 

 

 

1. From here, you can enter further observations, or use the top navigation menu to navigate to other functions within Nature’s Notebook.

 

 

1. This concludes our presentation on reporting your observations of plant phenology. Thank you for your time and interest in our program!

 

File Type	application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
File Title	Training Materials
Author	Theresa Crimmins
Last Modified By	Alexis Lincicome
File Modified	2011-04-22
File Created	2010-07-23

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