Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

Phenology is becoming more important to study with human impacts on the environment including urbanization and climate change. The UCSBlooms project is a year-long blooms tracking project that began March 11, 2019 and concluded on March 17, 2020. This project uses the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) citizen scientists and the citizen science program iNaturalist to track the phenology of six species of plants found on the UCSB campus. Citizen scientists are much more likely to participate in organized events rather than an open-ended project. Citizen scientists are also more likely to observe species in flower than species that are not in bloom. Non-native species have less variation in phenostages at a single date than native species. The environmental cues used to determine movement through a species’ phenology differs between families. There are many factors that affect the phenology of campus plants including urban heat islands, phylogeny, and native status. This report is the undergraduate senior thesis of the author in fulfillment for the UCSB Biological Sciences Senior Honors Program.