Spotting seasonal change is as easy as looking at a pretty picture. The “Season Spotter” citizen science project is an ongoing research project that needs your help classifying photos of landscapes. With over 250 digital cameras mounted on towers and platforms across North America (and beyond), images of vegetated landscapes are continuously photographed. Landscapes include forests, grasslands and croplands. There are A LOT of images that need to be processed, showing a unique record of how plants respond to seasonal change. Signs of seasonal change include the timing of leafing, flowering, and fruiting. Some images can be classified using computer algorithms, but nothing beats the human eye when it comes to pattern recognition. Spend a little of your time looking at pretty pictures, and you can further research to better understand how the natural world responds to climate change.

http://seasonspotter.org/