Climate scientists may soon be taking their work home and checking out their neighbours' lab notebooks. “Uncle Sam wants your observations of flowering and fruiting American plants,” notes Anna Barnett on the Climate Feedback blog (http://tinyurl.com/bfcq3v). The USA National Phenology Network tracks the seasonal cycles of plants and animals, and monitors what effect climate change is having on them, and they need help from 'citizen scientists'.

The consortium of universities, non-profit organizations and government agencies will eventually be seeking help from the public with tracking animal migration data as well as gathering historical phenological records. (For more details, see http://www.usanpn.org/.)

Barnett, assistant editor at Nature Reports: Climate Change, notes that “if they round up enough recruits, they may get striking results” — such as those of a recent Audubon Society study. This used four decades of amateur bird-watching survey data to show that more than half of North American bird species have already started to move northwards to cooler climes.