Reconstructing 120 years of climate change impacts on Joshua tree flowering via research

In the southwest US, Jeremy B. Yoder @jbyoder and colleagues used over 10,000 iNaturalist images of flowering Joshua Trees such as these by @brewbooks, @matt_bristol, @gregg29, and @karinp111 to reconstruct 120 years of climate change impacts on flowering phenology.

They used the iNat observations to train machine learning models that predict flowering from annual weather records. “Our findings reaffirm the value of crowdsourcing for understanding climate change impacts on biodiversity.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.14478