✨Flowers and Fauna along the Appalachian Trail Corridor - 2022 Year in Review

As this year comes to a close, we want to thank everyone who's contributed observations and identifications to this project. In 2022, we've welcomed 245 new members and added over 10,000 new observations, to reach a total of 34,100 observations in the project! These observations are compiled and are to be analyzed over years to identify shifts phenology as climate change affects mountain landscapes.

In our 2022 analysis, we marked three of the target species in the project list to serve as early, mid, and late spring bioindicators and these are, Yellow Trout Lily, Painted Trillium, and Canada Mayflower. The species are found throughout the entire corridor and align with bioclimatic law, making them ideal species to monitor. Going forward, we'd love to see more observations of these common species in all stages, from when they first shoot up from the soil, to when they drop their fruit. This allows us to narrow down those flowering windows to monitor how they shift overtime.

🌸Check out this interactive map of our target species along the AT from AMC's GIS Scientist! https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/78c838099a6e42ada12b6532a178bf23

🌸See some of the most popular observations on iNat and other stats here in the global iNat 2022 Year in Review: https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2022

Thanks again to those who participated in this project this year! You've proven crowdsourcing phenology data through iNat as a useful research tool and were excited to see our dataset grow. Additional thanks to our volunteer curators with helping add observations to the project. Let's continue to work together and grow this project even more next year. Thank you!

❄️ Looking for some winter citizen science? Join CSO!
CSO is a citizen science campaign to measure snow in backcountry mountain landscapes. If you are a winter enthusiast, you are being recruited to take snow measurements in the mountains and upload your observations on the Snow Scope app. Your observations help scientists improve snow and water runoff models, which are important to wildlife, fisheries, agriculture, and more, and also mitigate avalanche danger. See more at https://communitysnowobs.org/

Posted on December 16, 2022 04:44 PM by val_neuhausser