BudBurst

BudBurst is an U.S based citizen-engagement initiave from the Chicago Botanic Garden and multiple universities, involving citizens of neighborhoods in Chicago to monitor plants in their surroundings and report their phenological changes throughout the years on the project website (http://www.budburst.org). It was designed to inform citizen scientists, from all ages and backgrounds, about the context of climate change and the effect that it has on our plants in an outdoorsy, tangible and ubiquitous process.

The process of Phenology used in this project, or the study of plant life cycle events, requires citizens to first collect data about the site (the irrigation, the shading, the proximity to a building or concrete or asphalt) and data about the first flower, first leaf, and peak flower.

Citizens are then engaging in a learning process about their neighbourhoods, developing new behaviours towards their ecological environment, and moving from the observers’ space to the engaged space.

What I think is lacking in this project is a way to measure all this data that a citizen is gathering. As a citizen science taking part in this project, I do understand perfectly the engagement with my neighbourhood, but I fail to see the long-term results of this projects and I think it can be pushed further and scaled to achieve a bigger impact.