New York state’s winters have warmed faster than any other season — and that means the plants, insects, and animals that thrive here during the winter months are changing too. Around the Finger Lakes, a group of citizen scientists aims to help document those changes.
Their method: An intense, volunteer-driven period of ecological surveying called a BioBlitz.
“We want to know what's living here now to capture that snapshot,” said Ingrid Zabel, the climate change education manager at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca. “Then, long term, we could see if that's changing.”
On a mild January morning, Zabel strolled through the woods behind Ithaca’s Cayuga Nature Center, stopping every so often to take a photograph. At the base of a pine tree, she stooped down to document the needles on the ground. Then, stepping closer, she took a photo of the details of the tree’s bark.
Zabel is one of nearly 50 participants in this winter’s four-day BioBlitz. Her organization has run them seasonally for the past several years. The photos Zabel takes become data points that ecologists can access to help understand the area’s biodiversity.
Participants document any species they see, from miniscule insects to large animals and trees, and then upload them to an app and website called iNaturalist. The platform allows other users from around the world to add identifiers to each observation, helping to improve the quality of the data. Though the data isn’t perfect, the platform as a whole serves as a useful tool to build a record of the species that live in the region, Zabel said.
That record is becoming even more important as climate change has the potential to profoundly shift which species thrive across the state. New York’s average temperatures year round have climbed by 3°F since 1970, with winters warming three times faster than summers.
Scientists say warming temperatures exacerbate the risks the region’s biodiversity already faces from land-use change and invasive species. One example is some insect species, whose life-cycle timing is disrupted amid intense seasonal shifts, according to research by Thomas Powell, a professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University.
“It's climate change acting on top of all the other problematic things that we've done to our ecosystems that are really going to hamstring population and community's ability to kind of keep pace with our changing world,” said Powell.
So far, it’s too early for Zabel to say if the seasonal BioBlitzes have documented any long-term species changes in the region. But she wonders how the region’s biodiversity will be affected if winters continue to warm — and how the living organisms around her may change too.
During this winter’s event, participants documented over 300 species, including mallards, mosses, and mosquitos. The most-observed species were the Northern Cardinal and Christmas Fern.