The Chicago Botanic Garden has completed the first pilot year of a project aimed at creating a national blooming database. The aim is to track the bloom times of various flowers across the country. Kay Havens is with the Botanic Garden. She says the BudBurst project received about nine-hundred observations about when particular species bloomed.
HAVENS: Over the next several years as people repeat those observations, we’ll be able to say this species is flowering a week earlier, or this species isn’t seemingly affected by temperature changes.
Havens says the information will help scientists track the effects of climate change on different plant species. Havens says dozens of people have come forward with their own historic data sets that she hopes to incorporate into BudBurst next year.