Harnessing the power of herbarium digitization, crowdsourcing, and phylofloristics to assess and predict phenological responses

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Global environmental change has transformed our world. In the Eastern United States, increasing temperatures, for example, have had a significant impact on the timing of life events of plants and animals. For example, among the plants of this region, the flush of new leaves and spring flowering times occur more than two weeks earlier than decades prior. This project uses thousands of botanical specimens in museums across 16 states to understand the reasons why certain plants advance the timing of their life events more than others and to predict how plants will respond in the future. This work is broadly applicable to agricultural systems and the management of natural areas. As part of this effort, thousands of citizen-scientists will be engaged in the science of environmental change. In addition, educational and informative podcasts and teacher training programs will be developed. Finally, the project will also train undergraduate and graduate students and will enhance scientific infrastructure by making collections and their associated data more widely available.A vital resource in the study of phenological responses to climate change is historical records, especially those residing in natural history museums. Pressed and dried herbarium specimens, for example, represent snapshots of plant phenological events (e.g., flowering, fruiting) at specific places, times, and in association with specific climates. These specimens can facilitate the assessment of phenological variation across species ranges, and help elucidate plausible mechanistic causes, as well as highlight future expected responses. This project will use digitized herbaria to investigate plant phenology across the eastern U.S. and will address three specific aims. First, it will crowd-source phenological data from ca. 200,000 digitized herbarium specimens representing 1000 species from the eastern U.S. to estimate phenological change. Second, it will place phenological responses of these species in an evolutionary context by using large-scale genomic approaches to assess whether phenological traits can be predicted from evolutionary relationships. Third, it will develop models that identify climatic drivers of phenological responses and integrate these data to forecast spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic compositions of future plant assemblages.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.