Abstract
The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) hosts the largest volunteer-contributed collection of plant phenology observations in the USA. The potential contributions of these spatially and temporally explicit observations of flowers and pollen cones to the field of aerobiology remain largely unexplored. Here, we introduce this freely available dataset and demonstrate its prospective applications for modeling airborne pollen in a case study. Specifically, we compare the timing of 4265 observations of flowering for oak (Quercus) trees in the eastern USA to winter–spring temperatures. We then use this relationship to predict the day of peak flowering at 15 pollen monitoring stations in 15 years and compare the predicted day of peak flowering to the peak day of measured pollen (n = 111 station-years). There was a strong association between winter–spring temperature and the presence of open flowers (r2 = 0.66, p < 0.0001) and the predicted peak flowering was strongly correlated with peak airborne pollen concentrations (r2 = 0.81, p < 0.0001). These results demonstrate the potential for the USA-NPN’s phenological observations to underpin source-based models of airborne pollen. We also highlight opportunities for leveraging and enhancing this near real-time dataset for aerobiological applications.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology National Allergy Bureau for providing pollen concentration data and the following individuals in particular for the measurements that made this study possible: D.S. Shulan, G. Robinson, D. Cypcar, S. Fineman, W. Soong, R. Shah, B. Huxtable, P.E. Gallagher, F.H. Lewis, J.A. MacLean, S.E. Kosisky, L. Bielory, G.S. Safadi, and C. Randolph. We also thank the many participants who contribute phenology observations to the Nature’s Notebook program. The USA-NPN is supported by National Science Foundation grant DBI-2031660. KZ and YS acknowledge National Science Foundation award 2306198.
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DK, EV, and TMC led study conception, design, analysis, and writing, with input and review from all authors.
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Katz, D.S.W., Vogt, E., Manangan, A. et al. Observations from the USA National Phenology Network can be leveraged to model airborne pollen. Aerobiologia 39, 169–174 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-022-09774-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-022-09774-3