Erin O’Connell

Tyson Research and Conservation Project Coordinator
Co-Principal Investigator, Team Flora

Erin O’Connell is passionate about phenology, the timing of life history events. 

“In a more poetic sense, I like phenology because it keeps me paying attention to nature throughout the year. When I'm just on my phone, in my air conditioned house, I'm not necessarily paying attention to the change in the seasons. I like coming back to that, connecting to nature. Paying attention to when things are blooming is a way of following a calendar without using Google calendar. Even though I do have a Google calendar for keeping track of these things.

I also like how accessible it is. Seeing if something is flowering or not is fairly easy to determine. You do sometimes need a hand lens, but usually not a microscope. You're not running tests. It's an approachable thing that anyone can learn how to do. And then they too can be more connected with nature.”

Beyond the motivation of connecting with nature, Erin’s phenology project benefits Team Flora’s pursuit of collecting specimens of every plant at Tyson, which will be stored at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium.

“From a more practical scientific point of view, we have to pay attention to when things are flowering or fruiting because we are collecting plants to be voucher specimens (pressed plants to be store in the MoBot herbarium). These are going to be records of the species. In order to best represent each plant, we are trying to collect them when they're flowering or fruiting so that we can have all the parts of the plant available on the herbarium sheet. 

It can be a resource to future scientists. If they have a record of what time of year different things are flowering, they will know when to time their projects. And it is a bit of a canary in the coal mine for climate change because it is influencing the timing of phenology. If we have a record now and someone comes back 10 years from now and does this again, we can make direct comparisons through time. It is a neat way to take tabs on what nature's up to.”