old photos and records provide climate data

I thought this was an interesting news story from Nature, that perhaps suggests some ways that science libraries could connect with their local communities.

Climate researchers and ecologists are usually known for using complex computer simulations to study environmental change. But Boston University researchers are using more humble sources to determine the effects of climate change on local flora and fauna.

For the past three years, Richard Primack and Abraham Miller-Rushing have asked Massachusetts residents with long memories and a record-keeping habit to show how rising temperatures over the decades have changed the nature around them.

The data they have collected from amateur naturalists, farmers, landscape gardeners and photographers show that trees are sprouting leaves earlier in spring, birds are changing their migratory habits, and the patterns of flowers' blooming is changing.

"It's a good way to show that something is really happening, to species that people know," says Primack, who presented the work at the meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Memphis, Tennessee. "It will help us make the argument that global climate change is a reality even more convincing to the public."

Family albums highlight climate change

Interestingly, they also "data mined" an arboretum, to see what state of development plants used to be at a particular time of year in the past.

Primack, a CAS professor of biology, and graduate student Abraham Miller-Rushing (GRS’08) have recently reported that the [Arnold Arboretum]’s flowering denizens are blooming more than a week earlier on average than a century ago. The advancing bloom times correspond to Boston’s rising annual temperatures, which since 1885 have increased by nearly three degrees Fahrenheit. “These plants have been flowering about eight days earlier than they did at the beginning of the 20th century,” Primack says, “and the earlier flowering is in response to warming conditions.”

While scientists have seen similar trends worldwide in the past 20 years, this study is the first in North America to draw extensively upon historical data reaching back to the late 19th century. Primack found the data in the arboretum’s herbarium, a museum of 80,000 dried and flattened plant specimens mounted on cardboard, many of them in flower, and labeled to show when they were collected. During the summer of 2003, Primack and undergraduates Carolyn Imbres (CAS’06) and Daniel Primack (CAS’06) combed the herbarium for records of when plants flowered in the past. They focused on 229 plants, all still alive and blooming in the arboretum. The oldest specimen was cut from a flowering lilac in 1885.

B.U. Bridge: In flowers, BU botanists see global warming - September 2004