MeadoWatch Trainings

What is MeadoWatch? To start with, it's a citizen science program in which volunteers collect phenological data for select species of wildflowers, information which helps scientists determine how ranges and seasons are being affected by climate change. It's also a wonderful excuse for volunteers to hike either of two beautiful trails in Mount Rainier National Park. Click on the photo to read more, or visit MeadoWatch website for even more information about the program. You may also sign up for their newsletter on the site.

This year, MeadoWatch offers three training sessions for new or returning volunteers:
June 1, Wednesday (6:30-8:30 PM); University of Washington, Seattle
June 11, Saturday (9:30-11:30 AM); Mt. Rainier National Park
June 25, Saturday (1:30-3:30 PM); University of Washington, Seattle

If you would like to attend any of these sessions, please RSVP to Janneke Hille Riis Lambers at jhrl@uw.edu

Phenology Photo Op!

Visitors love coming to the park to view our wildflowers, but I need your help to update what's blooming where.

As you're out working in the park this summer, please let me know what flowers you see blooming, whether that is in a meadow, on a trail, or alongside a park road. I'm also looking for photos of currently blooming wildflowers - your photo may be featured on the park website and social media sites!

Wildflower updates are posted weekly on the park website at http://www.nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/wildflower-status.htm and on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MountRainierNPS.

So what to email me:

• Name of wildflower (or a photo if you don't know the ID)
• Location of wildflower in the park (Ex. Longmire Campground, Silver Falls trail, Grand Park, Sunrise Road, etc)

That's it! Thanks for the help!

Contact Kristyn Loving via kristyn_loving(at)nps.gov

MeadoWatch 2014

MeadoWatch is looking to recruit volunteers for the 2014 wildflower season! This program was a big hit in the Park last year with volunteers gathering phenologic data on the occurrence of specific species in selected areas.

This year, observers will monitor ten different wildflower species at nine locations along a system of trails which run north to south across approximately 2000 feet (600 meters) of elevation. The 5.5 mile round-trip hike consists of the east branch of the Lakes Trail to the Skyline Trail and finally to the Paradise Glacier trail. This hike can take anywhere from 4 to 8 hours depending on trail conditions, the volunteers' plant identification experience and how fast each person hikes. As a token of appreciation for collecting valuable phenological data, project volunteers may enter the park for free on the day that they will be surveying, and will also have the option to camp within the park for free.

Sign for MeadoWatch or learn more about the project through their website MeadoWatch.org

If you would like to be involved in a citizen science project studying phenology on Mt. Rainier through the collection of photographs from across the entire mountain, please read the details regarding Photo Collection here.

MeadoWatch staff will be holding a training session at the Tahoma Woods Education Center on June 21, 9:00 AM to approximately noon. Contact Anna Wilson mwatch(at)uw.edu for more information.

Citizen scientists join NASA to predict snow melt and wildflower bloom

Citizen Scientist Karen Murante collects
MeadoWatch data on Mazama Ridge in 2013

Last summer, 48 volunteers participated in our new citizen science program called "MeadoWatch," collecting about 17,000 data points on the timing of flowering plants at Paradise. This winter, the program's coordinators, Janneke Hille Ris Lambers and Jessica Lundquist at the University of Washington and Regina Rochefort at North Cascades National Park, received a grant from NASA's Applied Sciences division to study ways of combining these data with satellite imagery to forecast dates of snow melt and peak flower bloom. Such information would help managers at Mount Rainier National Park to set spring schedules, including plowing, facility opening, trail maintenance, and the timing of meadow restoration, and would help park visitors to plan the timing of sightseeing and backcountry hiking. Researchers would also be able to use these forecast models to project future impacts from global climate change, including the effects on plant communities and wildlife activity. Community groups like the Mountaineers and Washington Trails Association could benefit from such information as well.

NASA's grant program seeks to find useful ecological or natural resource management applications for its Earth observation products, in combination with biological observations by citizen scientists. The grant will fund a one-year feasibility study, which could be followed by three years of additional funding if the first year produces promising results.

In our case, the project is based on four premises:

1. Snow disappearance can be forecast from MODIS Snow Cover imagery, captured by satellite, in combination with SNOTEL data collected at the Paradise weather station.
2. Snow disappearance influences the timing of wildflower bloom. (Previous research by Elli Theobold, beginning in 2002, has shown a strong correlation between the two.)
3. Quantifying wildflower "phenology" (the dates of budding, flowering, and setting seed) is feasible through Citizen Science.
4. Natural resource management and conservation would be improved by a better understanding of the dates of snow disappearance and wildflower bloom.

In addition to the research conducted by citizen scientists at Mount Rainier last summer, Lambers and others have used "geotagged" photos on the popular photo service Flickr to add data points to their study. Most digital photos today include embedded information about when they were taken, and embedded location data are becoming more and more common as well, especially in images taken with smartphones. The researchers were able to find more than 2,000 photos on Flickr that included both date and location data, allowing them to collect "crowd-sourced" information about when and where the flowers had bloomed.

NASA imagery from January 2014
(for a comparison with 2013, see the
Cliff Mass weather blog.)

Over the next year, with the help of NASA funding, the UW researchers will develop and validate models for forecasting snow disappearance and wildflower phenology, using NASA satellite imagery, climate station data, remote microclimate sensors, MeadoWatch data, crowd-sourced photography, and previous research. They will also try to develop new products that are both feasible and helpful for decision-making. If these efforts are successful, the next step will be to refine the models and develop methods of automating them through remote sensing.

Meanwhile, volunteer will continue to be a key component of the research. This summer, MeadoWatch volunteers will return to the Paradise trails to watch and document the flowers as they bud, bloom, and set seeds. These ground-based, human-gathered data will be combined with high tech satellite imagery to come up with new ways of understanding our world.

If you'd like to participate in the MeadoWatch program, visit the project website at https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/meadowatch/, or contact Anna Wilson, MeadoWatch coordinator, at mwatch@uw.edu. You can also upload your own wildflower photos to the group's Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/groups/meadowatch/.

Here is the original project proposal that won the NASA grant:

Snow, Montane Wildflowers, and Citizen Scientists HilleRisLambers, Lundquist & Rochefort Proposal Summary The timing of key life events like reproduction (i.e. phenology) is tightly linked to climate. For example, alpine wildflowers emerge and flower within a few weeks of snow disappearance, and complete their life‐cycles before first frost in early autumn. Because annual variability in snow disappearance is large, the timing of seasonal wildflower displays also varies annually, influencing visitation and staffing needs within parks. Additionally, as climate change causes earlier snow disappearance, wildflowers that cannot shift their phenology to match this altered “climate window” may decline. Thus, resource managers and conservation biologists need the ability to seasonally forecast snow disappearance and wildflower phenology as well as monitor their long‐term annual trends to better conserve and manage high mountain wildflower meadows. To address these issues, we propose to combine MODIS‐based images of snow covered area (SCA), citizen science observations and models to develop decision‐making tools at Mt. Rainier National Park (Washington). Specifically, we will develop and validate snow models driven by MODIS SCA and daily observations of temperature, precipitation and snow (from a SNOTEL climate station) that generate spatially explicit forecasts of snow disappearance date. Next, we will use date‐stamped photos of wildflowers from photo‐sharing websites to develop phenological forecasts driven by snow disappearance date. Phenological models will be validated with data from an existing citizen science program, which will be expanded in scope to meet monitoring goals. Finally, we will partner with the National Park Service to create a long‐term monitoring program of snow dynamics and wildflower phenology. Operationally, these estimates will 1) help managers plan where and when trail maintenance, conservation/restoration activities, and monitoring can occur, 2) allow visitors to better plan trips to view and photograph wildflowers, and eventually, 3) help resource managers identify the climatic and biological signs of climate change.

Tracking montane wildflowers to unlock the secrets of our changing world

This article comes from Janneke Hille Riis Lambers of the University of Washington:

To residents of western Washington, the beginning of the high mountain hiking season doesn’t start until June or July – as snow is cleared or disappears from mountain roads and hiking trails. For example, the roads to the Sunrise Visitor Center and Mowich Lake at Mt. Rainier National Park only recently opened this year (early July), and some of the beautiful hikes from those locations still require hiking over snow.

As an environmental scientist based at University of Washington, this time of year means a flurry of logistical planning and coordination, as my students and I continue our studies on the relationships between climate, tree growth, and wildflowers at Mt. Rainier National Park. Although 1-3 feet of snow remains at some of our field sites above Paradise Meadows, the Avalanche lily has already emerged and is even setting seed at our lower elevation study sites near Reflection Lakes. If we’re not careful, we can miss the entire three-week flowering season of this beautiful species, which emerges directly from the melting snow sometime between mid-July and mid-August (depending on how late in summer the heavy snowpack melts out that year).

Exactly when the Avalanche lily blooms is significant for a number of reasons. Aesthetically, it is one of the most charismatic plant species in the meadows of Mt. Rainier (in our opinion), and a true sign that summer is coming to the high mountains. But the phenology of this species is also an important indicator of a changing climate. Phenology is the seasonal timing of life events, like a plant’s flowering and seedset, or an animal’s migration, reproduction and hibernation. And phenology is frequently directly tied to climate.

Although you wouldn’t know it from some of the cool and wet springs we’ve experienced in western Washington in the last 2-3 years, the Pacific Northwest has warmed by an average of 0.83°C in the last 100 years (according to the Climate Impacts Group at University of Washington). Our climate is changing, and the timing of the seasons is changing with it. Climate scientists tell us we should expect even more warming in the next 100 years.

This warming trend has implications for the phenology of plants and animals in Washington. Plants will likely emerge and flower earlier in the spring, and animals may also migrate or reproduce earlier in the season. This could mean that farmers markets will offer asparagus and cherries earlier in spring as the growing season advances. Our western Washington forests may become more productive as the growing season extends, but only where there is plenty of moisture and where pests (like the mountain pine beetle) or forest fires don’t also increase in frequency and abundance.

At Mt. Rainier National Park, the Avalanche lily (and other high mountain plant species) will likely emerge earlier as snow melt advances, and eating huckleberries at high elevations may also be possible earlier in the summer. Some of these changes may be problematic: the insects that pollinate Avalanche lilies and the bears that count on huckleberries for food may be in trouble if they can’t modify their behavior to keep track of their food resources.

To better understand the link between climate and the phenology of individual species — including the Avalanche lily — scientists like me have to take detailed notes on many individual plants. For example, my graduate student Elli Theobald has been returning to the same plants growing in Mt. Rainier National Park every year since 2010 so she can carefully track when this species, and other wildflowers, first emerges from the ground, flowers, and set seed. Eventually, she will compare those data to the local climate each plant experienced in that year (which we measure with microclimate sensors). The more data she and scientists like us have, the more we know and the better we can anticipate change, both in our local parks as well as regionally.

Collecting such data is time-consuming and difficult to get in the volumes scientists need for analysis. Scientists therefore often turn to the general public for help. A recently founded citizen science program out of my lab (MeadoWatch) is engaging in two such efforts at Mt. Rainier National Park. We have 60 volunteers lined up for ‘wildflower hikes’ throughout the summer, during which they will observe and note the timing of flowering for ten wildflower species. Our hikes are all full for this summer, but check out our website next spring if you want to participate in summer of 2014. If you are eager to participate in scientific research this year, we are also asking visitors like you to share any wildflower pictures you have taken within Mt. Rainier National Park with us. As long as we know exactly when and where each picture was taken (e.g. from date-stamps and geo-tags), it can serve as an ‘observation’ of phenology of whatever species you photographed. Together, these data sources will allow us to understand how the wildflower meadows come alive after snowmelt and change hue over the course of the summer as different wildflower species bloom.

You can join this effort by uploading any wildflower pictures you’ve taken within the  park to our project website on iNaturlist.org (see our project website for more details).  Additionally, if you are interested in continuing to monitor phenology in your own backyard when you get back from your visit to Mt. Rainier, consider working with our partner organization, the USA National Phenology Network, which engages volunteers throughout the country to monitor the phenology of nearly 900 plant and animal species through Nature's Notebook.

Regardless of which of these programs you engage in, your observations, along with many others, will have meaningful impact. They will allow scientists like me and my graduate student Elli Theobald to continue our quest for scientific discovery. Additionally, your data will also allow us to make very real, practical resource management recommendations to Mt. Rainier National Park on activities which are linked to the timing of the wildflower season (e.g. peak visitation, plant restoration activities). We hope you will participate!

Recruiting for MeadoWatch

Love hiking and viewing Washington's alpine wildflowers? Interested in gaining an understanding of how scientists study the potential impacts of climate change on native plants? If so, MeadoWatch would love your help this summer!

The University of Washington Biology Department is currently recruiting approximately 50 volunteers to join MeadoWatch, a citizen science program which will monitor the phenology of wildflowers this upcoming summer. Your participation will help researchers understand how climate influences the flowers in mountain meadows at Mt. Rainier National Park.

As a volunteer, you will be asked to attend one orientation session and conduct at least one wildflower survey in Mt. Rainier National Park this summer. Wildflower surveys will occur between late June and late September (depending on the snow season), and will start and end at Reflection Lakes. Volunteers will stop at nine pre-determined stations along the trail to record the phenophases (e.g. budding, flowering, etc.) for ten different wildflower species. In return, you will get free entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park, and if you so desire, you may camp for 1-2 nights without charge at the Volunteer Campground at Longmire.

For more information, please visit the MeadoWatch website at
https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/meadowatch/

or contact Anna Wilson, MeadoWatch Coordinator at mwatch@uw.edu.