For most of the 37 years that we lived on the farm outside of Sussex, New Brunswick, I kept daily weather journals to help us learn about the natural world that we were living and working in. 

In 2013, the Fundy Biosphere Reserve created a video about my weather journals, as part of their Climate Change Proxy Materials initiative (funded by the New Brunswick Environmental Trust Fund) that focuses on capturing citizen sourced climate data.   You can read more about their project here.

Using my records, they were able to show that since the early 1970s, the frost-free growing season where we lived is 25 days longer, the breeding season for spring peepers has expanded an extra 29 days, robins are appearing a full one month earlier in the spring, and lilacs are showing a seven day advance in their growing season.

The Fundy Biosphere Reserve received much praise for the film, which was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, and which received peer validation through the Phoenix Award by the New Brunswick Environmental Network.

The Fundy Biosphere Reserve hopes to continue building this project in the future with more such citizen-sourced materials.  If you have records that you think might be of interest to them, you can contact them at [email protected]