Phenology Monitoring at The Morton Arboretum

The Forest Ecology lab at The Morton Arboretum seeks to understand the impacts of global change on trees and forests. The ultimate goal of the phenology monitoring program at The Morton Arboretum is to understand and predict how weather and climate variability impacts trees on the Arboretum’s grounds and in their natural habitats. To do this, we monitor the timing of leaf and flower development to understand what controls tree life cycles and how those controls vary across the tree of life.  By partnering with the USA National Phenology Network, we are able to combine observations made by volunteers of trees here at the Arboretum with those made by other citizen scientists from across the country. We will use this information to not only study threats to trees in their natural habitat, but provide the latest observations and predictions of events such as spring bloom and fall color the the Arboretum’s visitors.

Phenology Monitoring Volunteer Handbook

This document contains information and resources needed to help get volunteers started and keep going.

Observing Resources

Below are links to help with identifying tree phenophases correctly. The Acer and Quercus guides are genus-level phenophase guides that have not been approved by the USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN). The characteristics of individual trees and species may differ from the images shown.

Below are also links to the National Phenology Network botany and phenophase primers. These are for all plants, but provide more in-depth descriptions of plant structures such as types of flowers and their parts.