Life cycle records

[Trevor Ellis]

Changing patterns relative to life cycles (Phenology) of all kinds have become a rather hot topic over the past few years and there are a number of opportunities for us to send in recordings of various life cycle events - Springwatch being perhaps the best known TV programme that deals with such things relative to animals/birds. My own experience is that there have been some changes especially in flower/herb/shrub and vegetable 'performances' and in the habits/appearances of wildlife in the garden. Recording of all this stuff is obviously mammoth hence the specialty units & organisations set up for the purpose. However, any one of us can make records of what is of particular interest whether it be how successful (or otherwise as in my case this year!) our outdoor tomatoes have been, how our plants are responding to climate change etc. etc. I wonder if something could or should be incorporated into IG programs to enable anyone interested to make and record personally pertinent observations. Requests for facility to record rainfall and temperature indicate that this might be the case. I know that there is already at least one available software program dedicated to this kind of study where one can record details re. any animal, bird or plant life together with information related to situation e.g. longitude, latitude, height, exposure, earliest flowering, latest flowering, etc.. Any thoughts anyone?

[Eric Hardy]

That is an interesting thought Trevor. Woodland Trust have a website called Nature's Calendar which you can find here http://www.naturescalendar.org.uk/.
I have noticed that plants seem flower earlier these days than I remember and some shrubs seem to have a second flowering season in one year. Of course I have never made a note of these things and it is just a feeling. Your idea is a good one but I think I am getting too old to start. It needs several years of observations to become valuable.

[ideasguy]

Ive moved this topic, Trevor, from the Master Database board to Ideas Genie Pro.
If we can muster enough support for the feature, then its something I would consider adding to IG Pro.

Thanks for your interesting suggestion and comments, Trevor and Eric. Its nice to hear what folk would like in the software.
Thats how it gets better
Lets see how the thoughts and ideas develop here!

[Trevor Ellis]

Come on Eric, there looks to be many more miles in you yet. I'm 67 and reckon on being about middle aged! I checked out the Woodland Trust site and it was interesting to see how the combined daffodil records seemed to confirm a general rather than local trend. No matter how long we can make records for, they could be be submitted to a central bank such as the woodland Trust - or even our own - IG bank. Now that might be an interesting prospect and we would have the satisfaction of knowing that our individual tiny contributions would add up to a far greater picture. The graph indicating the warming I think is to be expected since as I commented upon in another posting, we are in macrocosmic terms, only just coming out of the last ice age. I seem to have either lost, wiped or misplaced the circular chart I did on disc for a number of ice ages spanning many millions of years. I think that it would have been perhaps of interest to some of the members to see. I'll keep on looking for it. Sort of puts things into context on the wider scale since we naturally tend to focus on more of a micro level and of course all the media hype encourages this rather than seeing that it's all happened before on a number of occasions. The important thing seems to me to be that we are the first to have the facility to make ongoing relatively detailed records that can be combined in so easily. Thanks for the link.

Trevor