1. LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF INFORMATION The Kara Clauser Story

2. CONTENTS: Chapter I: The beginning Chapter II: Undergraduate education Chapter III: How GIS won me over Chapter IV: Current projects

4. BS ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY Reproductive Plant Ecology Pollinator Studies Undergraduate Research: Evaluating the role of nectar reward on flower revisits in bumblebee foraging.

5. WHY I CHOSE GIS 1.GIS has many applications that I can use in fields that I care about. 2. Maps are awesome.

6. CURRENT GIS PROJECTS

8. Employs volunteers to collect phenology observations for hundreds of species of plants and animals across the United States.

9. 1. Determining spatial and temporal trends in phenology across the nation 2. Using phenology as an indicator of species and habitat vulnerability to environmental variability and climate change 3. Determining the relationship between phenology and ecosystem processes and services RESEARCH APPLICATIONS OF DATA GENERATED BY NATURE’S NOTEBOOK:

10. and how these patterns can be used to detect the quality and consistency of a citizen science approach to data collection. EXPLORING SPATIAL TRENDS IN THE NATURE’S NOTEBOOK DATASET Common Lilac Cloned Lilac Native Flowering Dogwood Cloned Dogwood Northern Red Oak Red Maple Sugar Maple Laurel Oak Balsam Poplar Quaking Aspen Eastern Cottonwood Boxelder Fremont Cottonwood Oregon White Oak Vine Maple High Priority Species

11. 1.How do community collected data points compare to the expected species ranges, and can the outliers be used to assess data quality? 2.Are dedicated participants randomly distributed across the country and across species, or are there identifiable biases? 3.Which phenophases are more represented than others and does this vary regionally? 4.Which areas and species have the least amount of data? RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

12. THANK YOU Kara Clauser kclauser@email.arizona.edu