Log in or Sign up
  1. phenology love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. The scientific study of periodic biological phenomena, such as flowering, breeding, and migration, in relation to climatic conditions.
  2. n. The relationship between a periodic biological phenomenon and climatic conditions.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. That branch of applied meteorology which treats of the influence of climate on the recurrence of the annual phenomena of animal and vegetable life. So far as it concerns plant-growth, phenology is also a branch of botany, and records dates of budding, leafing, blooming, and fruiting, in order to correlate these epochs with the attendant progress of meteorological conditions. Among the phenomena of animal life, the migration of birds has been especially studied as a department of phenology.

Wiktionary

  1. n. biology The study of the effect of climate on periodic biological phenomena.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. (Biol.) The science of the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena, as the migrations and breeding of birds, the flowering and fruiting of plants, etc.

Etymologies

  1. pheno(menon) + -logy. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

Show 10 more examples...

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘phenology’.

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • reesetee Interesting--thanks, John. This is big in birding, but I never knew it had a specific term to describe it. Sep 16, 2008

  • john "Phenology is the science of natural occurrences, yearly events like the first snow, the first blooming of hepatica and the arrival of the first whippoorwill. Keeping diaries of such occurrences was a hobby of counts and lords in Europe, and there are records in Kyoto, Japan, of the flowering of cherry blossom trees dating back 900 years. Among the most notable American phenological records were those kept by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond."

    The New York Times, Weather History , by Anthony DePalma, September 15, 2008 Sep 16, 2008

  • mollusque The study of the timing of recurring natural phenomena such as migrations or spring flowering. A formerly obscure science now important for detecting effects of climate change. Apr 9, 2008

Tweets

Looking for tweets for phenology.

‘phenology’ has been looked up 1592 times, added to 12 lists, commented on 3 times, and has a Scrabble score of 18.