June 16 and 17, 2005

Cornhusker Hotel, Lincoln, NE

Hosted by

The High Plains Observatory for Integrated Phenology:

Predicting the Behavior and Life Cycles of Introduced and Native Plants, Insects, and Plant Diseases on the Landscape

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE

Phenology studies the seasonal timing of different developmental stages and the life cycles of plants and animals. Understanding the processes that impact these developmental stages and forecasting phenological stages are important to understand the interplay between climate and managed and natural ecosystems including agriculture and its related industries, ecotourism, and those who enjoy the aesthetics of plants. Similarly, climate change modeling and satellite-based forecasting systems need basic phenology networks and models to interpret their spectral data, especially the “greenness” or photosynthetic response to the environment. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scientists and constituents who are interested in participating in a phenology network and the resulting models to: 1) develop useful phenological and climatological datasets, 2) determine the interrelationships between phenological data from abundant agricultural research plots with plant disease, insect populations, aesthetic plants, and wildlife populations and migrations, 3) determine how climate affects phenology and monitor climate change, 4) design new decision support systems for managed ecosystems such as forecasting insect and plant disease outbreaks, augmenting integrated pest management and organic agroecosystems, and 5) provide the cyberinfrastructure and data mining tools that can lead to the information fusion for complex ecosystems and societies.