Research
More About the Botany Alive! Project and Data Set
The wildflower table display has been supported by volunteer collectors since 1904. Specimens collected within a 50-mile radius of St. Johnsbury, Vermont are brought to the Fairbanks Museum twice a week by community scientists to create the Botany Alive Wildflower Bloom Table, a breath-taking and always-changing array of local flowers and grasses. Each blooming or fruiting specimen is identified and displayed by volunteers and curators, which has contributed to over a century of first bloom and fruit dates being recorded. The data set, which spans back over 200 years, has been meticulously kept up, allowing for a unique opportunity to see how the ranges and timing of blooming and fruiting events has been impacted by climate change.
By digitizing these records, we hope to make this dataset available to scientists for phenology research. Specifically, we are working with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies to enter this data into the Darwin Core biodiversity information storage database, to track changes in biodiversity.
Weather data has been collected in the same museum for over 100 years. With the data digitised here by volunteers, we seek to analyze changes in phenology in relation to weather data to identify possible implications resulting from climate change.