Cherry Blossom Festival, March 2021
The Cherry Blossom Festival in DC occurs in March or April every year. I put together some images and datasets to share via the NMNH social media accounts. Here are some images from the posts.
Here we see the branch of a Yoshino cherry tree (Prunus yedoensis) at the DC Tidal Basin with the Jefferson Memorial in the background. On March 19, we see that the buds have just starting growing into florets, but by March 29, the blossoms have already reached their peak (defined as >70% of Yoshino cherry blossoms open).
Cherry blossom data
We are very fortunate to have centuries of observations made by monks and others in Kyoto, Japan dating back to the 9th century. Here, I plotted publicly available flowering data, and we can see that over the past 500 years, the full-flowering date in Kyoto has shifted earlier and earlier. The peak bloom date this year was March 26; the last time it was this early was several hundred years ago, indicating the effects of climate change.
Phenology for 15th to 21st centuries was acquired and analyzed by Aono and Kazui (2008; International Journal of Climatology, 28, 905-914), and is available here: http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/
January 2021
I recently had a paper come out that was a pandemic project—we had limited ability to collect new data during quarantine, so this project was based entirely on publicly available genomic data.
Click to go to pdf of the paper
Link to writeup about how the pandemic changed how we use publicly available data
January 2020
I started a position as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution