Whats new with abundance and intensity in Spring 2011?
By reporting when a phenophase is and is not occurring, we get a sense of the duration of the phenophase at your site, but we do not know how strongly the phenophase is expressed over that time period. For example, if you report seeing nest building by a bluebird species over a period of three weeks, there is no way for scientists using your data to know whether you saw one pair of bluebirds taking three weeks to build a successful nest, or whether you saw one the first week, ten the second week, and then two the third week. To get an idea of how strongly the phenophase is expressed, and when the peak of activity occurs, we have added the ability for you to report on the abundance or intensity for almost all of the phenophases for your species. For animals, we generally ask the observer to record the number of individuals seen in a given phenophase, and for plants we generally ask for some measure of the intensity of the phenophase on your individual plant, like an estimate of the numb
