Tracking the phenological developments of native wildflowers at Cooper Mountain Nature Park

This project examines the developmental changes occurring in wildflowers at Cooper Mountain Nature Park. The goal is to successfully implement a program to monitor and collect rare wild flowers for the Metro Native Plant Center. The project began as our Americorps Community Action Project, CAP, through NWSA. Our “Bloomtime Project” aids in the Native Plant Center’s vital seed saving and amplification process by tracking the phenological developments for native flowers at Cooper Mountain. We tracked changes in phenological events involving plant flowering; with observations of interest ranging from first bud, flowering, seed formation, to seed dispersal. We created a straightforward data collection formula with codes assigned to each species, site, and phenological state. Cooper Mountain is a unique habitat with Oregon White Oak savannas and open prairies that have been relatively undisturbed for hundreds of years. This distinctive area is home to diverse and rare native wildflowers that have all but disappeared from the Northern Willamette Valley. Over three months we surveyed the phenological changes of targeted wildflower species on the mountain each week. Working with Metro staff, we set up a GPS database, took hundreds of valuable photographs of the flowers in each phenological stage, and successfully collected ripe seed from many significant species. This information reveals when and where the ideal time for seed collection is to local resource technicians, biologists and volunteers. With future years of data collection, we can examine irregularities in species bloom times resulting from changes in our local climate.