The Plant Phenology Ontology: A New Informatics Resource for Large-Scale Integration of Plant Phenology Data.

Brian J Stucky,John Deck,Ellen G Denny,Rob Guralnick,Ramona Walls,Kjell Bolmgren

doi:10.3389/fpls.2018.00517

Abstract

Plant phenology – the timing of plant life-cycle events, such as flowering or leafing out – plays a fundamental role in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, including human agricultural systems. Because plant phenology is often linked with climatic variables, there is widespread interest in developing a deeper understanding of global plant phenology patterns and trends. Although phenology data from around the world are currently available, truly global analyses of plant phenology have so far been difficult because the organizations producing large-scale phenology data are using non-standardized terminologies and metrics during data collection and data processing. To address this problem, we have developed the Plant Phenology Ontology (PPO). The PPO provides the standardized vocabulary and semantic framework that is needed for large-scale integration of heterogeneous plant phenology data. Here, we describe the PPO, and we also report preliminary results of using the PPO and a new data processing pipeline to build a large dataset of phenology information from North America and Europe.

Highlights

Plant phenology – the timing of plant life-cycle events, such as leaf bud burst, flowering, and fruiting – has cascading effects on multiple levels of biological organization, from individuals to ecosystems
We report preliminary results of ongoing efforts to use the Plant Phenology Ontology (PPO) to combine disparate phenology datasets from USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN), National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and PEP725, and we show that these integrated data can be used in transcontinental phenology analyses
To map phenology data to the PPO, we examined all phenological terminology used by the USA-NPN, NEON, and PEP725 databases and evaluated whether each term and associated observations could be faithfully modeled using entities from the PPO

Summary

Introduction

Plant phenology – the timing of plant life-cycle events, such as leaf bud burst, flowering, and fruiting – has cascading effects on multiple levels of biological organization, from individuals to ecosystems. Phenology affects the fitness of individual plants, it affects the fitness of organisms that depend on them, which, in terrestrial ecosystems, includes virtually all animals. The phenological responses of plants are known to be highly responsive to environmental drivers and strongly influenced by climate change (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003; Menzel et al, 2006; Cleland et al, 2007; IPCC, 2008; Wolkovich et al, 2012; Chuine and Régnière, 2017). Increasing scientific understanding of relationships between phenology and the structure and function of ecosystems can help inform adaptive management of natural resources (Walther, 2010; Bellard et al, 2012; Enquist et al, 2014; Pacifici et al, 2015)

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Conclusion