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Discover and Document Changes in Nature Near You

Track changes in the timing of plant and animal seasonal activity with the Nature's Notebook program. See what it’s like to be a Nature’s Notebook observer in this video from our partners at Audubon Starr Ranch:

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YOUR OBSERVATION DECK
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Join a Data Collection Campaign

Nature's Notebook Campaings focus on species of particular interest to researchers and natural resource managers. Find a campaign near you to join!

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View Species

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Sugar Maple
Acer saccharum
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Common Milkweed
Asclepias syriaca
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Allen's hummingbird
Selasphorus sasin
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American Bullfrog
Lithobates catesbeianus
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Mayfly
Hexagenia spp.
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Creosote bush
Larrea tridentata

Bring Phenology to your Classroom

Explore our phenology-focused lesson plans for grade levels from Kindergarten to Post-secondary, and learn how you can use Nature's Notebook with your students.

Learn How Your Data Are Used


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Nature's Notebook data speak for the trees

Tue, Sep 24, 2024

Understanding how climate change is affecting species is especially important for threatened or endangered species, which already exhibit perilously low species numbers. A research team led by Jeremy Yoder at California State University, Northridge sought to determine the environmental conditions that Joshua trees must experience to trigger flowering. Using over 10,000 images of Joshua tree contributed to iNaturalist, the team predicted whether and when Joshua trees flowered in years past, back to 1900, and tested the performance of the model in predicting the timing of flowering by comparing the predictions to observations contributed to Nature’s Notebook. They determined that over the past 120+ years, the trees have increased how frequently they flower, as a result of progressively warmer temperatures and more variable rainfall over the period.


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Is the (sunlight) window closing for spring wildflowers in deciduous forests?

Tue, Jul 23, 2024

In many deciduous forests, understory plants such as spring blooming wildflowers depend on a critical period of sunlight before overstory tree leaves block out the sun. Climate change has caused a shift to earlier leaf out in many plants, but not all taxa are shifting at the same rate. Two recent studies found conflicting results about whether wildflowers are advancing their springtime activity in step with overstory trees. The authors of the studies came together to investigate what might be behind the difference in results and found that difference in the types of data used, herbarium data in one and Nature’s Notebook data in the other, along with the geographic and temporal extent of the datasets evaluated, were likely the cause. The study demonstrates the importance of both types of data to explore these types of complex ecological questions. Once the methods of the two studies were adjusted to be more similar, the results indicated that wildflowers in the southern part of eastern North America are less sensitive to changes in temperature than overstory trees and that phenological activity was earlier in warmer years and in warmer locations.


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Nature's Notebook observers help pinpoint when to take action against invasive hemlock woolly adelgid

Mon, May 13, 2024

Invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae or HWA) has caused widespread decline and mortality in hemlock trees, an important foundation species in the Eastern U.S. One method used for control of this species is the release of specialist predators at two life cycle stages: emergence from summer dormancy in early fall and egg laying in late winter. Authors of this study engaged Nature’s Notebook observers to collect data on HWA. The authors found that emergence of HWA from summer dormancy was consistent, starting at the end of September in each year of the study, while the start of egg laying in late winter was much more variable. Better knowledge of when to take management actions to reduce HWA will help preserve these important trees.

Explore the Glossary

See definitions of terms used in descriptions of plant and animal phenophases.