Phenology
/fɪˈnɒlədʒi/noun
The study of the timing of recurring biological events such as flowering, leaf fall, and bird migration, and how climate shifts them.
The Greek roots
Literally: “study of appearings”
The story of the word
The Belgian botanist Charles Morren put the word into circulation around 1849, building it on the same verb that gave us phenomenon, literally the thing that shows itself. The science is older than the name: Japanese cherry-blossom dates run back over a thousand years, and English gardeners kept flowering calendars long before anyone called it phenology. Climate researchers now mine those old notebooks, because a first-flowering date recorded in 1780 is a temperature record in disguise.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
In a sentence
Forty years of phenology records show the oaks leafing out nearly two weeks earlier than they did in the 1970s.
She kept a phenology diary for the allotment, one line per species per spring.