New OPUS grant for the Primack Lab.

By Richard B. Primack

“My only integral experience is in my vision”

—Henry David Thoreau

We recently received a new National Science Foundation grant through the OPUS program entitled, “The impacts of changing phenology on species, ecological interactions, and conservation.” OPUS is an acronym for Opportunities for Promoting Understanding through Synthesis.

This project will allow my former students and I to write a series of review articles on topics related to our research activities on climate change, phenology, sampling biases with historical data, ecological mismatches, botanical gardens and conservation.  

Euonymus oxyphyllus growing at the Arnold Arboretum. 

The project will also assist us to make our research datasets publicly available, along with the metadata needed to use this data in other research projects. For example, for the past 17 years we have been gathering data on the flowering times, leafing out times, and bird arrival times in Concord, MA, building on the observations of Henry David Thoreau.  We have also been accumulating data on how the abundance of plants species has been changing over time Concord. This data will soon be available on-line. 

Cherry blossom festival in Tokyo. 

Datasets from elsewhere in the USA and other countries where we have worked, including China, South Korea, Japan, and Germany, will similarly be available on-line. This includes the network of eight botanical gardens that monitored the phenology of over 1600 species of woody plants.