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The Connection
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Issue Winter 2013
Greetings!

 

Happy holidays! I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to working with you in 2014. We have much to celebrate as 2013 comes to a close. First, we wish to congratulate Dr. Heidi Steltzer of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado on receiving the first  Sulzman Award for Excellence in Education and Mentoring from the Biogeosciences section of the American Geophysical Union. Dr. Steltzer has incorporated phenology monitoring in both her teaching and her research. We are proud to call Dr. Steltzer a partner and a friend!

 

Next, we raise a glass to everyone that is involved in Nature's Notebook in some way. Just this morning, we reached one of our goals for 2013 - we logged 1 million phenology records in Nature's Notebook for the year! Congratulations to you all, and thank you for your continued participation!   

As always, we are here to support you in your phenology-themed efforts. If you have thoughts, suggestions, comments, or good jokes, please send them to me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you! 

 

Sincerely,

   

What's in this e-newsletter:

And more

 

What's new at Nature's Notebook and USA-NPN
teacup-laptop-man.jpg
videosInstructional videos for visualization tool and data download tool  Perhaps you've seen our online data visualization tool and/or our data download tool... these tools were both created to make data housed in the National Phenology Database more accessible. Though they were built to be easy to use, we realize that a little extra instruction never hurts. With that in mind, we've created several short "how to use these tools" videos that walk you through data visualization, download, and analysis within Excel. These are embedded in various places on the website and also posted on the USA-NPN YouTube channel. Let us know what you think!

webinarFirst ever Nature's Notebook webinar offered last month
In case you missed my many emails, we offered our first Nature's Notebook webinar in early November. You can check out the recording on our YouTube channel. Let us know what you'd like to see in future webinars by filling out the questionnaire, closing the end of this week!

updatesUpdates for "shared sites" users 
If you have multiple observers submitting observations on the same plants or animals at your site, hopefully you're using the "shared sites" functionality within Nature's Notebook. If you aren't, let's talk, it can make your life much easier! And if you are using shared sites, you'll be happy to know that site administrators can now change the status of a site - from personal to belonging to a group - under "Edit Site" on the Observation Deck. Also, we recently posted short videos on creating a group in Nature's Notebook and adding yourself to a group in Nature's Notebook to the USA-NPN YouTube channel.

Happenings in the field of phenology 
audubon Audubon center director wins fellowship for work with Nature's Notebook!  
Darcie Howard, director of the Montana Audubon Conservation Education Center in Billings, MT, won a Toyota TogetherGreen Fellowship for engaging local high school students in collecting phenology observations using Nature's Notebook. Learn more about Darcie's effort via the Billings Gazette. Congratulations, Darcie and Audubon!

A wonderful short video on phenology monitoring in Wisconsin
Hear Nina Leopold Bradley describe the effort initiated by her father, Aldo Leopold, that she's carried forward for decades, and what has changed.
 
Article in Global Change Biology uses Nature's Notebook data to refine vegetation models
A research team from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks recently used data collected by participants in Nature's Notebook to more accurately predict vegetation changes under future climate change scenarios. The researchers clearly indicated that phenology observations collected by species and across the varying Arctic landscape were critically important to their predictions.  Euskirchen et al., Global Change Biology Read more
 
More ways to get involved 
agu
See you at AGU 2013!
The American Geophysical Union meeting is happening this week! If you're in San Francisco, be sure to track down our executive director, Jake Weltzin, or our our assistant director, Alyssa Rosemartin, who are attending. They'd love to meet you!

Phenology-themed talks, posters, and sessions at AGU2013
 
Contact
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Theresa Crimmins / 520.622.0363 / [email protected]bio