FIELD NOTES BLOG

Shifting Signs of Spring

By Rowan Mermel
February 5, 2025

Despite winter being in full swing, many of us are counting down the days until spring  We are daydreaming about the tell-tale signs that winter is fading: skunk cabbage flowers poking up through the melting snow, swollen creeks rushing past, the earthy aroma of geosmin in the air, and the high pitch calls of chorus frogs and spring peepers. However, as we think about spring we may also notice how the transition to spring seems to be getting more erratic and happening earlier in the year. For example, as I write this in January it is 11°F outside, but in just a couple of days, the high temperature is forecasted to be 42°F. This strange weather is not just happenstance, it is a sign of our climate changing. Here in Northern Illinois, the average spring temperature has increased by 1°C (1.8°F) in the past 50 years, and it will continue to increase in the future if current global greenhouse gas emission rates continue. This increase may not seem like a big deal, but even a tiny temperature change can cause major ecosystem disruption. 


While a bit of an earlier spring may seem nice to those of us who tire of winter in December, it negatively affects our ecosystems by disrupting the timing of key events in the cycles of living things. The study of these cycles is called phenology, and it involves all of the recurring events in an organism’s life cycle such as migration, hibernation, breeding, blooming, and more. Disrupting these rhythms can damage ecosystems because organisms have evolved to rely on each other for reproduction and metabolism at certain times in their cycles in a process called coevolution. Problems arise because organisms rely on different factors when timing their cycles, for example, a flower might bloom based on day length, but the pollinator for that flower might rely on temperature for its spring emergence. The web of connections between organisms is incredibly complex, making it difficult to predict all of the changes that climate change will bring to our ecosystems. However, spring warming has been shown to affect bird migration, plant flowering and leaf out, insect emergence, amphibian arousal from hibernation, and many other key events in plant and animal cycles.



The impact of climate change on the phenology of plants and animals is one of the many ways that the climate and biodiversity crises are connected. The global reduction in biodiversity has made ecosystems more vulnerable to phenological mismatches as organisms may already have fewer food sources, pollinators, or carriers, and are thus more susceptible to changes in timing. Locally, the biggest impact of climate change on biodiversity through phenological change may be the proliferation of woody species in our prairies, woodlands, and savannas. The leaf out and flowering of woody plants is more responsive to warming than herbaceous plants, and thus they are increasingly able to outcompete herbaceous plants for valuable sunlight earlier in the year. This ultimately lowers the biodiversity of our native ecosystems,  showing why ecosystem restoration will continue to be important as we mitigate and cope with the effects of climate change.


Studying changes in phenology can be challenging because it requires large data sets that have consistent sampling over long periods of time. Creating these kinds of data sets is tricky because people in the past did not often have the same standards for random sampling that we do today. Community science projects like Bud Burst help to alleviate this problem by training volunteers to collect data on when key events like blooming occur. This way researchers can have data sets that are so large that they remove some of the issues with biased sampling, as long as volunteers are well trained and have easy to follow protocols. 


Changes in phenology due to climate change highlight the need to conserve and restore land with the changing climate in mind. Dr. Kimberly Hall, climate change ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, suggests that we do this by creating connectivity between conserved lands, making lands that are managed for commercial purposes more suitable for wildlife, removing invasive species, changing our priority from protecting individual species to protecting landscapes that promote biodiversity, and utilizing green infrastructure that increases biodiversity rather than lowering it. While we may lose species to climate-related extinction, we have the power to prevent more extinctions by conserving and reconstructing dynamic and resilient ecosystems.


Sources


https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/2024-spring-package


https://www.usgs.gov/news/when-timing-everything-migratory-bird-phenology-changing-climate


https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10124540/#:~:text=Prior%20studies%20on%20long%2Dterm,per%201%20%C2%B0C%20in


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214574522000323#:~:text=Insects%20shift%20phenology%20in%20response,with%20seasonal%20timing%20%5B11%5D.


https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9879156/


https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10124540/#:~:text=Prior%20studies%20on%20long%2Dterm,per%201%20%C2%B0C%20in


https://budburst.org/


https://glisa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MTIT_Biodiversity.pdf


RECENT ARTICLES

Happy National Make-A-Will Month

By Linda Sandquist • August 7, 2025
As we observe National Make-A-Will Month this August, I want to relate a personal story about preparing my own will. Have you ever heard the saying “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”? Up until a month ago, this statement described me since my husband is a lawyer and we had no will or estate plan. I counted myself in good company when I learned that Abraham Lincoln, Picasso, Sonny Bono, and Aretha Franklin all died without a will. And I had a lot in common with the 72% of Americans who have not officially spelled out what should happen to their assets upon their death. Wills and estate plans are easy to put off. They feel too complicated, too time-consuming and too official. And frankly it’s not much fun to think about who should get what, knowing that at least one person is going to be disappointed and someone will most likely think they were left with the short end of the stick. While a will can’t soothe hurt feelings, one with a named executor will speed up the probate process and ensure that your wishes are fulfilled. Creating a will doesn’t have to be time-consuming or difficult - there are many resources online to help you write a document that needs only to be witnessed and notarized. The resources I found were free, very helpful, and very legal. Steps were simplified and I completed my will in less than an hour. If your wishes are more complicated, finding an estate attorney is also easy and can be very affordable. Another benefit of making a will or estate plan is that you get to decide what charities and nonprofit organizations will receive a final gift from you. If you’ve been a passionate supporter of something over your lifetime, wouldn’t you like to give them a final gift that really means something? It’s easy to direct a certain dollar amount or a certain percentage of your estate to an organization you really care about. And the organization is bound by law to follow your intentions - you can choose whether you want your gift to go to a certain program, operations and overhead, building maintenance, or an endowment fund. Equally as impactful, is making your favorite charitable organization the beneficiary of your retirement fund, IRA, or life insurance policy. Here at Severson Dells Nature Center, we ask that you consider including us in your estate plans. When you do, you become part of our Heritage Society, a group of like-minded folks, dedicated to the future of nature education in our region. Your gift, large or small, will make a difference. In 2016, a bequest from Orville and Ruth Varland to Severson Dells created an endowment fund to support field trips for students from the Rockford Public Schools. The fund has grown over time and continues to make a difference in the lives of young people who come to the Dells, many experiencing nature for the first time. Each year, students who have never been in a forest, seen a natural creek, or sat in the grass are here because of the Varlands. The legacy of Orville and Ruth lives on and on and on. I invite you to celebrate and Make-A-Will this month. Take the time to look for online resources or contact your attorney. Make sure your intentions are clearly written down so that when the time comes, there is no question about what you wanted. Please consider including Severson Dells in your will and join our Heritage Society. And let us know that you included us so we can thank and celebrate you now! If you've already considered Severson Dells in your estate plans, let us know! Email me at linda@seversondells.org or call me at 815-335-2915. * Please note: Severson Dells Education Foundation is not a legal entity and cannot give legal advice. We encourage you to seek out legal advice should you have any questions about the process of making a will or leaving an estate gift. Our Tax ID number is 36-2985870

Summer Storms: Meteorology and our Local Environment

By Sydney Sherbitsky • July 16, 2025
Summer days have an intense energy. For us, it’s easy to pack a lot of activity into long, sunlight-filled days. The atmosphere is packed in a different way, with thick, heavy humidity and sun-baked heat. You have probably experienced one of these particularly sweltering days where periods of calm are interrupted with a sudden summer storm. One moment you are relaxing, the next, you hear the rumbling of thunder, and it begins to rain, instantly cooling the hot ground and taking the stickiness from the air. You don’t have long to take in the scene as the intensity of the heat gives way to an intense storm. This is a different kind of energy in the air; this is a summer storm.

Nature's Blueprint

By Shannon Osadjan • July 3, 2025
Nature holds the answers for how to be more efficient with managing our supplies of earth’s natural resources. In fact, nature serves as the inspiration and blueprint for many structures and objects we use every day! Biomimicry is a practice of engineering that creates designs based on structures and sequences from the Earth’s natural world, including but not limited to plants, animals, and geographies. Biomimicry designs are meant to imitate functions that already exist and occur in nature. These designs are being transferred over and scaled up to provide solutions to human caused problems. There are three main core principles that make up biomimicry: recreating natural shapes, processes, and entire ecosystems.