Welcome to Portland Budwatch!

We aim to build local knowledge about native plant life cycles by mobilizing volunteers who can regularly check on individual plants to note when they leaf out, bloom, bear fruit, and so on. The purpose of the citizen science research group will be to collect long-term data to understand how climate change is impacting local ecosystems. The collected data will be analyzed in order to make predictions about the consequences and share data for mitigating the potential effects of climate change. Portland Budwatch is partnered with the National Phenology Network (NPN) and uses the network database to store and organize all data. This allows our data to be compared with all other national data being collected by particpants working with NPN.

In our first year, we found out that citizen science accuracy data averaged about 90% (Fuccillo et al. 2011, unpublished data). This is wonderful news and allows us to move forward with our system of monitoring which appears highly successful. We have added two sites to our original site in Forest Park at on the Lower Macleay trail. Volunteers can choose any of thse locations or choose a subset of plants and observe across sites or any other combination that works for them.

The sites are:

Lower Macleay Trail: This is our forested site. containing all wild plants in the beautiful reserve right outside of Portland (Forest Park).

Laurelhurst Native Trail: This is our residential park site. It is located on the north end of Laurelhust park, an award winning park in SE Portland.

PSU Campus Native Garden: This is our fully urban site. It is located in front of the STRC building (SB2) on 11th street between Mill and Market on the Portland State University Campus.

The plants we monitor are:

Acer circinatum: Vine maple
Acrostaphylus uva ursi: Kinnick-kinnick
Corylus cornuta: Beaked Hazelnut
Gaultheria shallon: Salal
Mahonia aquifolium: Oregon grape
Mahonia repens: Creeping Oregon grape
Oemleria cerasiformis: Indian plum
Ribes sanguineum: Red flower currant
Rubus parviflorus: Thimbleberry
Rubus spectabilis: Salmonberry
Symphorocarpus albus: Snowberry
Tellima grandiflora: Fringe cup
Trillium ovatum: Trillium
Vaccinium parviflorum: Red huckleberry

Datasheets for all 3 sites (Laurelhurst, Lower Macleay, PSU campus Native Garden)