Discussion Questions
- What is phenology?
- This paper is very focused on plants, but what are some examples of phenology for non-plants?
- What are some of the ways that climate and phenology are linked?
- Given how big the phenology shifts detected have been, what data characteristics would you need to detect them? What data challenges are associated with this type of data?
- Is it important or necessary to forecast shifts that precisely in general?
- Phenology has been studied extensively, but what are most of the long-term records from? What biases does this insert into our understanding of phenology?
- The paper dedicated a section to open discussion about which family of models (theoretical, statistical, process oriented) is suitable for forecasting phenology. Each has its pros and cons.
- Describe each of these family of models and how they differ from each other
- Which approach do you feel may be best? Why? And when (for specific questions? Taxa? Ecosystems? Data availability scenarios?)