Herbarium-Derived Phenological Data in North America

We present infrastructure for developing large-scale and long-term phenological datasets across multiple herbaria, as well as a sample dataset that has been acquired from the digital archives of 440 distinct herbaria across North America and further processed to evaluate phenological status. This dataset contains 2,319,672 specimen records of plants collected while reproductively active. These data have been modified to explicitly codify the observed phenological status of each specimen at the time of collection, and to remove specimens for which information essential to assessing their phenology or the corresponding climate conditions in the year and location of collection were missing.  As different collectors have used distinct taxonomic schema over space and time in documenting the specimens being collected, these data were also rectified into a single unified taxonomic schema to ensure that consistent taxon names were used throughout the dataset.  Further, this data has been united..., Phenological data pertaining to flowering times in this dataset consist of 2,319,672 specimen records of plant species collected in flower, while strobilating, or while fertile (this last category primarily applied to graminoids). These data were derived from the digital archives of 440 herbaria (see Readme for full listing), and subsequently cleaned and modified using several criteria described below to facilitate their use in phenological assessment.
To ensure the quality of the data used in this study, specimens were included in the dataset analyzed here only if, at the time of digitization, herbarium personnel had: verified that the specimens were collected when in flower, strobilating, or fertile; recorded GPS coordinates of the location from which the specimen was collected; and provided the precise date of collection (including month, date, and year). Only those specimens that were explicitly recorded reproductive status within either the DarwinCore “reproductivecondition” or “li..., Code was written in python 3.7.
Multiple python packages are required to run these packages (see attached .yml file for full list). We recommend the usage of Anaconda for constructing the python environment and installing the python packages required to produce this dataset, including the PhenoColl package that was developed for this project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8323153) , # North American Herbarium Data for Phenological Assessment

## Author Information

### Principal Investigator Contact Information

* Name: Isaac W. Park
* Institution: University of California - Santa Barbara
* Address: 4117 Life Sciences Building, University of California Santa Barbara 93116
* Email: isaac\[e-mail]

## Date of data collection

07-01-2021 through 08-30-2021

## Geographic location of data collection:

North America

## Information about funding sources that supported the collection of the data

Munging of this data from raw herbarium data was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through:

* NSF DEB-1556768 (to S.J.M., I.W.P.)
* NSF DEB-2105932 (to S.J.M., I.W.P)
* NSF DEB-2105907 (to S.R.)
* NSF DEB-2105903 (to C.C.D.)

## SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION

1. Licenses/restrictions placed on the data: Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0)(note that supplementary data deposited in Zenodo, which includes the rectified phenological data developed using these data a...