Journey North with the Spring

Journey North with the Spring

Posted: under Uncategorized.

? One of my favorite sites on the Web is Journey North. The site is based here in Minneapolis and just won a Webby award, the Oscar of the Internet, for excellence as an educational site. The thing I like about it is how it has evolved since it has been on the Web. Originally designed to help students understand and become involved in the migration of birds, it has come to include the phenology of more than just birds. In case that word is new to you, phenology is “the study of periodic biological phenomena in relation to climate, particularly seasonal changes. Phenological events, or stages of plant growth, serve as bases for the analysis of local seasons and climatic zones.

???? Those of us who are not actively involved in education can visit the site and follow the course of the seasons based on the observations of school children all over north America. Find out where the Monarch butterflies are this week on their move to the North. Whose tulips have bloomed and whose are budding? Where was the first worm sited this spring? ??? I’m most excited about making my own phenology log now. The Journey North site tracks leaf out and has students adopt a tree in their environment to be the test case. I will probably use the cranberry viburnum in my yard instead of a tree, because all mine are too tall for me to be able to tell when the leaves are the size of a quarter. Journey North participants use their tulips for early markers, I will use my Iris reticulata. They are always up first in my yard. Then I will watch the honeylocust tree for late leaf out. It always comes last. Seasonal cues guided the lives of Native Americans before the Europeans arrived with their clocks and calendars. In the zone 6 area I left, settlers had learned from them to use the white oak as the marker for planting their corn. It was to be done when the oak leaves were the size of a mouse’s ear.

???? Classes sign up to make observations and report them to the Journey North site. Their reports become part of the data pool that shows them how seasonal changes move across the Northern Hemisphere. They can follow the guidelines to plant a tulip bed in fall and track their emergence and bloom in spring. The guidelines are necessary so that good generalizations can be made. A school in New Jersey that has three tulip beds in three locations, reported that the Journey North bed emerged a full fifteen days after the other two. It became a weekly challenge question on the Journey North site to speculate why that might have happened. Why do you think it did?