AsianScientist (Nov. 17, 2025) – Simply when India was rising from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Geetha Ramaswami, crew lead at SeasonWatch, a citizen science undertaking in India, and two aspiring younger ecologists began probing social media for photos of flowers. Not for the aesthetic great thing about golden bathe tree, the flame of the forest, or the pink silk cotton, however to know how these timber are affected by local weather change. Their current paper within the Journal of Biosciences hints at a geographical sample of those three flowering crops in India.
In 2010, Ramaswami based SeasonWatch.in, a platform for citizen scientists to register a tree of their neighbourhood. Then, every week, the citizen scientists observe the amount of leaves, flowers, and fruit on the tree. This manner, scientists with entry to the information may work out seasonal patterns of leafing, flowering, and fruiting within the timber.
“The primary information have been truly contributed by faculty kids and academics from the state of Kerala,” stated Ramaswami, referring to an eco-club program known as SEED (Pupil Empowerment for Environmental Improvement). “And 15 years later, that’s nonetheless essentially the most energetic and contributive group of residents.”
In 2021, Ramaswami observed that many individuals uploaded images of flowers on social media, and typically it was attainable to extract metadata — together with the date and site of the {photograph} — from the pictures. That’s when she realised they might mix the ability of social media with SeasonWatch information to find out the flowering crops’ seasonalities.
Since social media customers posted photos of those crops from throughout India, they might additionally research whether or not the identical flowering crops bloom on the similar time in every single place. Within the World North, research have proven that timber reply to altering environments by shifting the timing of leaf-out, flowering, and fruiting over the long run. “We’d like large-scale long-term research within the tropics to know what timber do right here,” defined Ramaswami.
The crew of three annotated by hand between 250 and 350 photos from social media posts on Fb, Instagram, and X (previously Twitter), image-based citizen science portals just like the Indian Biodiversity Portal and iNaturalist, and digital photograph repositories like Flickr.
Typically, the identical timber have completely different methods for survival in several climates. For instance, the generally noticed Amaltas tree, with its distinctly brilliant yellow flowers, has completely different survival methods in dry and moist areas. In dry areas, they first shed all their leaves earlier than flowering, however in areas receiving ample rain, they don’t shed their leaves even within the dry season. So, to find out whether or not the timber are responding to a altering local weather, scientists first want to know how timber in the identical areas behave over time.
The group studied the ‘golden bathe tree’ (generally generally known as Amaltas), the ‘flame of the forest’ (generally known as Palash), and pink silk cotton (extensively generally known as Semal). Their evaluation of three.5 years of collective information confirmed that the datasets from social media and SeasonWatch complemented one another.
“Roughly each of those information units, that are collected in a very completely different format, with fully completely different causes, are nonetheless conveying the identical data,” stated Ramaswami. Comparable research in temperate climates have yielded conflicting outcomes from citizen science and scientifically collected datasets.
When the crew plotted the flowering patterns of Amaltas, Palash, and Semal, all three timber confirmed indicators of flowering all year long. Amaltas confirmed indicators of flowering all year long, even on the similar latitudes, particularly as much as 13°N, which passes near Bengaluru within the state of Karnataka. It’s particularly noticeable in Amaltas within the southern Indian state of Kerala, the place it used to flower solely in March and April. “However now individuals are seeing timber with flowers even in September, October, November,” stated Ramaswami, which could possibly be a sign of a altering local weather.
At northern latitudes, the datasets have been restricted to attract concrete conclusions in regards to the timber’ seasonality, although they urged that the identical timber bloomed over restricted intervals. That factors to geographical variations of the identical crops at completely different latitudes.
Ramaswami admitted that scientists want extra public participation by means of the Season Watch undertaking to attract concrete conclusions in regards to the affect of local weather change on flowering patterns of those timber. Whereas temperature and humidity may have an effect on the flowering, the presently analysed information couldn’t conclusively set up that. Language limitations, smartphone entry, and so on., may additionally create variations in citizen science information assortment throughout India. For social media posts, typically images lack the metadata that scientists want, just like the time and site of the {photograph}, thus rendering them unusable for scientific functions.
Nonetheless, the undertaking establishes the feasibility of utilizing information collected by citizen scientists and from social media to handle scientific questions. Ramaswami can be working along with her colleagues on the Nature Conservation Basis, a charity organisation, SeasonsWatch is part of, and elsewhere to determine related patterns of tropical timber, similar to jackfruit, mango, and tamarind.
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Supply: Seasonwatch: Photographs: Shutterstock/RobinsonThomas
The research may be discovered at: Latitudinal patterns of flowering phenology of three widespread tropical species from public media and information repositories
