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This is something you can do with no special equipment. It's a pilot project aimed at USians and a bit too late for me for most things, but it's really interesting anyway:
Project Budburst is collecting data on plants' yearly milestones. It's a simple way for amateurs to contribute to hard data about the effects of global warming.
It started about right now, which means that for most plants in my area it's a couple-few months late for me to observe the date of budding and first flower, but I intend to try to contribute what I can.
Here's something cool about it. It's through observations just like these that science got its start in the first place, and that all the great breakthroughs in natural history happened -- our present understanding of ecological interactions, the theory of evolution, everything. On the other hand, this particular project is so greatly facilitated and enhanced by the internet that igt reduces me to sputtering in wonder. So you get continuity with Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton and Pliny and Charles Darwin and Beatrix Potter (did you know she was a scientist first and resorted to children's books because her groundbreaking work with lichens was rejected by the Royal Scoiety? That she was the first person to describe lichens as symbiotic systems? I'm champing at the bit to see if the movie about her is good, it looks like it!), and you also get amazingly modern distributed citizen science.
All I can say is wheee!
And I hope what we learn enables us to (1) force changes and (2) guide changes sensibly.
edited to add: Thanks to Multimap, I now know that my house is at:
Lat: 36:58:00N (36.9668) Lon: 122:01:52W (-122.0312)
Also edited to add that I found out about this from Burning Silo.
Project Budburst is collecting data on plants' yearly milestones. It's a simple way for amateurs to contribute to hard data about the effects of global warming.
It started about right now, which means that for most plants in my area it's a couple-few months late for me to observe the date of budding and first flower, but I intend to try to contribute what I can.
Here's something cool about it. It's through observations just like these that science got its start in the first place, and that all the great breakthroughs in natural history happened -- our present understanding of ecological interactions, the theory of evolution, everything. On the other hand, this particular project is so greatly facilitated and enhanced by the internet that igt reduces me to sputtering in wonder. So you get continuity with Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton and Pliny and Charles Darwin and Beatrix Potter (did you know she was a scientist first and resorted to children's books because her groundbreaking work with lichens was rejected by the Royal Scoiety? That she was the first person to describe lichens as symbiotic systems? I'm champing at the bit to see if the movie about her is good, it looks like it!), and you also get amazingly modern distributed citizen science.
All I can say is wheee!
And I hope what we learn enables us to (1) force changes and (2) guide changes sensibly.
edited to add: Thanks to Multimap, I now know that my house is at:
Lat: 36:58:00N (36.9668) Lon: 122:01:52W (-122.0312)
Also edited to add that I found out about this from Burning Silo.
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