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USA National Phenology Network The Nature's Notebook Plant and Animal Observing Program

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This presentation will guide you through the steps of selecting individual plants to observe.
This information is also available on USA-NPN website at www.usanpn.org.

This presentation covers selecting individual plants to observe using Nature’s Notebook. If you are only observing animals, you will not need to watch this presentation.

When you are selecting your individual plants to monitor, there are several things you should consider:

Whether the plant is an annual plant, which completes its life cycle in one year, or a perennial plant, which lives for many years

Choose plants that appear to be healthy, physically undamaged, and free of insect or pathogen infestations.

For most observers, we recommend observing between 1 and 3 individuals of the same plant species at a site. Observing multiple individuals helps to give scientists an idea of the variation in phenology among individuals at your site. In some years and for some phenophases, multiple individuals will exhibit identical timing in their phenology, and in other years or phenophases they will not. Even if your multiple individuals seem to always exhibit the same timing, that is still interesting to know and valuable data to collect!

If you choose to select multiple plants to monitor, try to select plants growing in a similar environment (for example, get similar amounts of sun or shade), but that are not direct neighbors – that is, selected plants should not be closer than two to three times the width of one of the plants.
The graphic on this image shows three individual creosote bushes that an observer is monitoring. They all share a similar environment, but are not direct neighbors.

For annuals plants (which only survive one growing season) and biennial plants (which survive for two growing seasons), avoid choosing the first or the last seedling to emerge in the spring since they may not be representative of the larger population at your site.

For annual plants, you will need to select a new plant to register and monitor each year; you will need to select a new individual every other year for biennial plants.

Where possible, try to avoid individuals that are closer than 20 feet to a road or building,

Also, please read the “Special Considerations for Observing” section of the species profile for your plant(s) to find out if there are other considerations for your plant species. For example, some species grow clonally and form large clumps of stems growing from the same roots. If your plant can be clonal, try to choose individual stems from different clumps. Where it is not possible to follow these guidelines for a specific individual, simply mention that in the comments section of your Nature’s Notebook Add or Edit Plants form. More information on registering your plants online via Nature’s Notebook is provided in the presentation “Report Data Online”.

If an individual plant dies or is obviously declining in health (when others of the same species around it are still healthy), you should select a new individual to observe. However, be sure to note the death in the comments section of your Nature’s Notebook ‘Add or Edit Plants’ form and add the replacement as a new plant with a different nickname.
If you are observing any annual or biennial species at your site, you will need to select a new plant on a regular basis since the individual plants die after one or two years, respectively.

This concludes our presentation on selecting individual plants. Thank you for your time and interest in our program!

File Type	application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
File Title	Slide 1
Author	Theresa Crimmins 2
Last Modified By	Theresa Crimmins
File Modified	2010-05-21
File Created	2009-08-21