Phenology walk signage & maps

[Sarah Hooghuis]

Hi everyone,

I hope you all are staying healthy and transitioning into this new normal the best you can!

I am serving as an Americorps member at the Green Mountain Audubon Center in Vermont and recently became a certified LPL. I decided to use this time to do a deep dive into planning/implementing a phenology walk. I'm going to start small with 4 species (Red maple, sugar maple, jack in the pulpit and common milkweed). Our walk will be used primarily for school programs, but also by staff, volunteers and visitors. To those of you with experience creating a phenology walk, did you use the templates from USNPN for signage? Or did you create your own? I am working with the template for now, but struggling a bit with how much or little information to share on my welcome sign and individual stops. I would love to see examples from others if you don't mind sharing them. I also hope to create a map of the walk - any recommendations for easy map creation? Any words of advice are welcome! Thanks!

Take care,

Sarah 

Sarah Hooghuis

Education & Outreach Americorps Member

(802) 434-3068 ext. 17

Pronouns: she, her, hers

 

Audubon Vermont
255 Sherman Hollow Road
Huntington, VT 05462
vt.audubon.org

 

[LoriAnne Barnett]

Hi Sarah! 

I wanted to post here since I noticed no one had answered you yet! 

Most folks usually make signs for their individual plants being monitored which include the phenophase definitions and photos, as we did with the phenophase photo guides in our LPL Certification Class. The template for the individual signs can be found on our phenology walk and trail resources page here, but it sounds like you already found that. ;) 

For the welcome signs, people typically include an overview of why they have the walk on the property, what information they hope to gather locally from the project, and why the species were chosen. Again, we've worked through lots of that info in our course. 

Here is an awesome photo of Jody Einerson from the Oregon Season Tracker program, holding the sign she made from our template! On her sign she's answered "what questions are we trying to answer?" "what species are we monitoring?" and "Who is participating?". She's also go a map of the site on there. You could put pins where the plants can be found along the physical trail.