STREET NATURAL
By HEATHER DEWAR
You say you daydream about being a scientist, but aren’t quite ready to give up your day job? Then join a nationwide network of citizen scientists helping researchers keep track of the changes brought by global warming.
If you live around Baltimore, all you have to do is find some Black-eyed Susans, which should be almost effortless. Cheap and cheery, the black-and-gold flowers are in every city neighborhood – they’re as hardy as cockroaches and much, much prettier.

Almost every public building in Maryland has a flower bed filled with Black-eyed Susans (aka Rudbeckia hirta). It’s the state flower, so landscapers are practically required to grow them. If you have any kind of garden – a big back yard or a couple of pots beside the stoop – and you don’t already grow black-eyed Susans, you probably could. They’re pretty much neglect-proof.

With that plant, a pencil and paper, and a little expert advice, you can be part of a year-old project called Project Budburst, which just added Baltimore to its network and is being coordinated locally by the Maryland Science Center.
Don’t believe the professional climate change naysayers. Climate change is serious. Tracking and understanding it is important. There’s a lot still to learn, but there’s no longer much doubt that we’ve already begun altering our planet’s climate in ways that we can’t predict or control. Amateurs’ observations have been an important source of data.

Differences seen at Walden Pond
Scientists from Harvard and Boston University have gone back to the notebooks that Henry David Thoreau kept in the 1850s, full of scribbled observations of plant and animal life that became the backbone of “Walden.” They compared Thoreau’s notes to other amateur botanists’ records, including the ledger book that an 1890s storekeeper filled with nature notes. Last October, the scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that flowering plants in the area near Walden Pond now bloom a full week earlier, on average, than they did in Thoreau’s time. Many once-common plants that Thoreau wrote about are no longer there.

The Project Budburst network is looking for volunteers to keep records like Thoreau’s, only much simpler. Volunteers only have to keep tabs on one plant, taking notes on the dates when its leaf buds start to swell, when its first flower opens, and when its blooming is done.

An army of observers
This science is called phenology, the study of the timing of plants and animals’ life cycles. The goal is to create a database of observations that track climate change all across the country and give researchers a yardstick for measuring changes a decade or a century from now.

Twelve science institutions across the country are enlisting volunteer citizen scientists to track climate change by studying local natural phenomena. Here in Baltimore, the Maryland Science Center is coordinating the Black-eyed Susan study along with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, one of the nation’s longest and most sophisticated scientific studies of urban ecology. Local citizen scientists’ data will be added to Project Budburst’s nationwide database of plant phenology observations. A mix of universities, museums and botanical gardens are taking part in Project Budburst, which is run out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.  ((Correction: In an earlier version, this paragraph mischaracterized the entities coordinating this citizen data-gathering. Baltimore Brew regrets the error.))

Baltimore’s modern-day Thoreaus
On a gorgeous Saturday morning in May, with gazillions of outdoor events going on, only a few people came to the Science Center for an hour-long volunteer training session. But those who did said they expect the project will be good for science and good for them too.

Ginger Ridgley wants to be a high school science teacher. At 27, she’s studying secondary education at Towson University, and she thought Project Budburst would be a great class project. “It’s all about learning to observe,” says Ridgley, who lives in leafy Hamilton. “That’s a basic skill of a scientist.”

Matthew Keeling grew up near Patterson Park, on a not-so-leafy, not-so-peaceful street. As a kid, he says, his parents took him to parks all over the city. “It gave me a good feeling to be out in nature,” he says. Keeling, 18, is now a freshman biology major at Morgan State. He plans to be a botanist, and is already starting to network in his field.

I’m taking part because I know good nature writing starts with good notes. The more I practice paying attention, the better my writing will be. Also because it seems fun, simple and important.

It’s not too late to get involved. Check out the science center’s Project Budburst website, http://marylandsciencecenter.org/exhibits/C3.html . Or send an email to C3@marylandsciencecenter.org, and project coordinator Katie Stofer will help you get started.

Can’t find a black-eyed Susan? No worries. You can pick another plant to study. Or grow your own. Katie’s got plenty of seeds.

EXTRAS:
* Here’s a link to a page of Thoreau’s journal that shows his notoriously bad handwriting.

* Here’s an abstract of the actual Walden Pond study.

* The Budburst Facebook group