PhenoMapping: A participatory visual tool for curation and verification of historical phenological data
funded by NFDI4Earth Incubator program.
PI: Dr. Lina Hörl and Dr. Yu Feng
Phenological data, especially long-term data, is crucial for understanding the impact of climate change. However, due to the lack of digitization, comprehensive phenological data from before the 20th century is highly incomplete, hindering long-term climate and ecological research and leaving this area underrepresented in Earth System Science (ESS). The innovation of this project lies in developing an interactive tool called PhenoMapping, which helps digitize and geocode historical records and matches the priorities of scientists’ demands and historians’ capacity through an online platform. It encourages volunteers’ contributions and also allows public users to explore phenological trends from decades and centuries ago. Using an archive collection from 1856 with 7,000 phenological observations as an example, we can demonstrate the value of this tool. Expected outputs include web-based data visualization and transcription tools, along with the acknowledgement of data contributions to existing phenological databases. The expertise of both teams, GDA in handling historical documents and TUM in geospatial data visualization, will support the project’s goal of bridging historical and modern phenological data for ESS research.