Enlisting the help of children

In watching the seasonal shift to earlier and earlier blooms:

Phenology is the science of tracking seasonal behaviors in plants and animals. It's an old science, with roots in ancient traditions that are tied to blossoming trees. In Japan and China, for instance, cherry and peach tree blooms signal the time of millennium-old festivals. Already it's been shown that Japan's cherry trees now bloom four days earlier than in the 1950s.

Similar warming trends are underway in North America, and the Project BudBurst will help fill in the details of how dozens of native species are adapting to global warming.

[snip]

Children are playing a big role in the project, said Henderson, both at home as well as via teachers who are incorporating the project into their regular curriculum.

"We found that really exciting, to reconnect children with the outside world," said Henderson.

"My kids enjoyed it and I think they learned a good deal," said Jenny Whittaker a teacher at St. Monica Academy in Chicago, where she involved students in a pilot version of the project last year. "They picked their trees and we labeled them."

Then the kids made daily visits to their trees, photographing and drawing pictures of the trees as spring awakened them. In fact, it was almost hard to keep the kids away from their trees, she said. The students later compiled their data and presented it to the school.

"The kids are very interested in global warming," Whittaker told Discovery News, "because they hear so much about it in the news."

And because it is their future that we're messing up right now.