Desert Data Labs
The NEON Explorer Suite · Plant timing

NEON Plant Phenology

A Shiny web app for exploring the National Ecological Observatory Network's plant phenology observations. It follows a fixed roster of tagged plants checked twice a week, and turns 46 field sites of leaf-out, flowering, and leaf-drop dates into a typical-year clock, per-plant timing cards, and a map of how spring arrives later as you head north. It reads timing (when each stage happens), not how many plants there are.

Launch Plant Phenology View on GitHub
Plant Phenologylaunch → Driver Cascade Small Mammals Birds Ground Beetles Plant Diversity Veg Structure Water Chemistry Mosquitoes Little Inverts
What it does

The app opens to a national map of NEON sites. Tap one to dive into its tagged plants, and it loads instantly from a per-site data bundle that ships with the app (no network round-trip). From there it shows what is tagged at the site by growth form, draws the typical year as overlapping seasonal petals (each phenophase's share of plants saying "yes" by week), places every plant by when it greens up and how long it carries leaves, and asks whether green-up is shifting year to year.

It is built for two audiences: anyone curious about how NEON tracks plant timing, and new field technicians getting to know the plants and phenophases at their site.

Highlights

Select-a-site map · A national map of all 46 bundled sites, with phenology plots sized by plants tagged and coloured by median green-up (honest grey where there is none). The demo opens Harvard Forest (red maple, red oak).
Overview: what is tagged here · The site's tagged plants broken down by growth form, the story so far, and a one-click analysis-ready export (a zip of tidy CSVs plus a codebook).
Phenology Clock · The typical year as overlapping seasonal petals: each phenophase's share of plants saying "yes" by week, pooled across years. Defaults to the dominant species; switch to compare.
Is green-up shifting? · Median leaf-out day per year (at least three plants per species-year), with a confidence-honest verdict that says "no clear shift" when the result could go either way.
Onset Lab · Every plant as a dot: green-up onset (the median day it first breaks leaf) against days carrying leaves, counted week by week. Tap to pin a card; faint plants do not yet have both recorded.
Plant profile cards · A downloadable card (PNG plus CSV) for any plant: green-up, flowering, last-leaf week, days carrying leaves, the phenophase calendar across years, and low-noise quality checks.
Across sites · The national gradient the multi-site data unlocks: median green-up against latitude (the spatial echo of Hopkins' bioclimatic law), and the same species followed across all of its sites.
46
NEON sites
9,515
tagged plants
499
species
10+
years of records
How it stays honest
The same group of tagged plants is checked all season, so this tells you when things happen, not how common a plant is. We label that clearly everywhere. Crews visit about twice a week, so we never know the exact day a stage began. We report the start as the midpoint between the last "no" visit and the first "yes" visit, and we flag any plant that was already in the stage at the first check. For how long a plant carries leaves, we count the actual weeks it had leaves rather than the gap from first leaf to last, so a desert plant that leafs out and drops twice in one year is not credited with a 300-day season. The Phenology Clock combines several years to show a typical year, and the year-to-year trend only fits when there are at least 5 years of data and says "no clear shift" when the result could go either way. We only show a number when there is enough data behind it (at least 5 checks per stage and week, at least 3 plants per species and year), and the colors are chosen to read clearly for color-blind viewers. Everything is loaded ahead of time from the published NEON data. This is an educational tool for exploring data. It is not affiliated with NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.