Measuring Our Planet's 'Vitality'

Over the next year or so, countless volunteers and scientists across the US will take their research outdoors, as part of a massive campaign of assessing the real influence that global warming and climate change have on the way seasonal plants grow and multiply. These measurements will have an increased significance over the coming years, when drought, heavy storms, and other weather phenomena caused by global warming will increase in intensity and will start threatening the world's food supply.

“This program is designed for people interested in participating in climate change science, not just reading about it. We encourage everyone to visit the USA National Phenology Network Web site and then go outside and observe the marvelous cycles of plant and animal life,” Jake Weltzin, a US Geological Survey scientist and also the executive director of the USA-National Phenology Network (USA-NPN), explains.

This organization is actually a consortium of scientists coming from all environments – from federal and government-backed agencies, to private companies, as well as from independent organizations. All these people will observe the way in which the cycles of nature progress over longer periods of time, how plants grow and develop, and during which time frames all of this happens. Over the past few years, it has become obvious throughout the world that the seasons are “shifting” within the twelvemonth, in that they no longer start in their “usual” months, but a couple of weeks later.

Noticing any changes in these natural rhythms is of crucial importance, the team says, because they could offer insight into how and why the behavior of numerous species of mammals, birds and insects changes, and may furthermore shed some light on why some of them continue to head for extinction, despite experts' best efforts to prevent this from happening.

Ecosystems as a whole will also be analyzed during this survey, and scientists involved with the study hope to gain a better understanding of the complex interactions that characterize these natural feats of our planet. Another goal of the research is to better grasp the importance of the connections that form between the forest and the animals living inside it, as well as how cutting the former affects the latter over time.