I see a fair bit of discussion here about plant phenology, with its importance being so emphasized that it’s an official annotation on observations. What I see talked about far less though is animal phenology. Does anyone here track things like the arrival of migratory birds to an area each year, the emergence of pollinators, etc?
Since Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena I would think that just the records of observations in animals does much of this - so as a whole we track this collectively. If you go to the taxon page of a particular fauna there are graphs of seasonality, history, and life stages for Aves, seasonality, history, life stage, and sex for Mammals and Insects, and etc. One can filter by place on those pages to find regional difference of the occurrences in question. For instance, compare Tricolored Bumble Bee Bombus ternarius in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada vs Centre County, PA, US. Or Swainson’s Thrush Catharus ustulatus in British Columbia vs Ecuador.
I think this is what you are wondering.
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Both things you mentioned are discussed here on the forum quite often, there’re topics about spring, pollinators, etc. iNat data is not the best to use for migration and similar stuff, there’s eBird an similar websites for that, which get more records more easily used to create graphs and useful for analytics, but there must be papers on iNat data in that context too.
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Hmm, I tried to do some searches earlier today and didn’t get many results. Maybe I just wasn’t using the best search terms or something. Oh well. Thanks anyway! :)
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