MeadoWatch: Wildflower Phenology in Mount Rainier National Park
Long-term database (2013-2019) with >42,000 phenological observations of 17 wildflower species across 28 plots, collected by 500+ volunteers.
- Size
- 6.9 MB
- Format
- CSV, XLSX
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Access
- Open Access
- Source
- Zenodo (record 6377054)
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Challenge
Are Mount Rainier's wildflowers flowering earlier in years when the snow melts earlier, and do all 17 species respond to snowmelt equally? Quantify the snowmelt-to-flowering shift across 2013-2019 and discuss what it implies under continued warming.
- Where to start
- Load MW_Phenocurves.csv, which gives one row per year x plot x species with SDD (snow-disappearance day-of-year) and peak (fitted peak-flowering day-of-year). Map the 4-letter species codes to names using the 'Species 4 letters code to full' sheet of MW_metadata.xlsx. Fit peak ~ SDD (e.g. with statsmodels) overall, then per species; optionally rebuild the raw flowering pulse for one species from MW_PhenoDat_2013_2019_anonymized.csv (Flower presence vs day-of-year) to see where 'peak' comes from.
- What to share
- A scatter of peak-flowering date vs snow-disappearance date with a fitted regression line (report the slope, R2 and p-value) plus a per-species sensitivity plot of the peak~SDD slopes, and a short statement on whether the earlier-snow/earlier-flowering shift is statistically detectable and which species track snowmelt most strongly.
💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.