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Submitted by ms.russo on Mon, 07/29/2019 - 16:53
Breadfruit is a major staple crop for the Pacific Islands, and has been distributed to the global tropics where it is growing in importance as a resilient and climate-smart food. Breadfruit is notoriously sensitive to climate, often used as the “climate calendar” for south Pacific farmers (depending on what breadfruit is doing it tells you when you should plant or harvest your other crops). Over the past two years, three separate citizen science projects have focused on breadfruit phenology. The largest, in Hawai’i, was funded by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grant, and included 200 participants and 450 trees from across Hawaii state. An additional project occurred in Jamaica with about 50 trees, and a new project has been initiated in Micronesia. As part of the SARE grant, the project lead would like to transfer the data into the National Phenology Network to have a permanent repository for the data.
I am collaborating with Professor Noa Lincoln to get this into the National Phenology Network.