Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The scientific study of periodic biological phenomena, such as flowering, breeding, and migration, in relation to climatic conditions.
- n. The relationship between a periodic biological phenomenon and climatic conditions.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- 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
- n. biology The study of the effect of climate on periodic biological phenomena.
GNU Webster's 1913
- 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
- pheno(menon) + -logy. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Hydrology, the research gathers together more than 25,000 long-term phenology trends for 726 species of plants and animals.”
“Hydrology, the researchers said they analyzed more than 25,000 long-term phenology trends for”
“The study of the seasons, known as phenology, is important for measuring how the weather is changing in Britain with global warming.”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“The timing of seasonal biological events, otherwise known as phenology, has been tracked in some places for centuries.”
“Scientists who study how seasons affect plant and animal life cycles -- it's called phenology -- say that on average, spring comes several days earlier now than it did a few decades ago.”
“Data from Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) are being used to generate daily maps that show exactly how plants are responding to the coming season, marking a significant improvement for 'phenology'.”
“Add "phenology" to the search reduces the hits to a more manageable "about 4,630″.”
“Native solitary and bumble bee populations are plummeting as global warming affects the timing, or phenology, of plants flowering, which is now occurring about 2.3 days earlier in the season.”
The Huffington Post: Dr. Reese Halter: Protecting Our Wild Prairies
“Marsham wrote the event down, in effect inventing a new field of study, phenology – the effects of cyclic and seasonal phenomena on plants and animals.”
The Guardian: Spring's here: skylarks overhead, moles in the garden, moths in the bathroom
“These changes follow the pattern found by Dr. Terry Root and colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the average shift in the behavior -- phenology -- of 130 species from 1970 to 2000 means that spring is now arriving on average 10 days earlier in the Northern Hemisphere.”
The Huffington Post: Brenda Ekwurzel, Ph.D.: Curious Observers Lend a Hand
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘phenology’.
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phrontistery - p
from phrontistery.info
pustule, purulence, pushful, purser, purpureal, putative, purpure, purpresture, purloin, purline, purlieu, purlicue and 1766 more...
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Blippets
Time~sphere phenomena, manipulations, fluctuations, processes, measurements, and oddities. For use in building my machine.
microfortnight, transilient, instant, flash, breath, blink, beat, momentary, nimesha, truti, second, centisecond and 120 more...
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Sima Yi's list
A list of words I find unusual and interesting.
dysphemism, hapax legomenon, rill, repristinate, exuviate, phillipic, fillip, cyanobacteria, prokaryotic, onomasticon, bibliotics, diplomatics and 45 more...
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Logodaedalus' Lexical Locutionary
Discombobulating the illiterate since the middle of the last century.
adiaphora, agitprop, alliteration, apophthegm, autarky, bête noire, bezoar, biorhythm, braggadocio, canaille, confabulate, confrère and 332 more...
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No Ap-ology
Unusual -ologies
morology, tidology, aerology, tyrology, orology, barology, tocology, doorology, ology, battology, dittology, cacology and 244 more...
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solarider's Words
maelstrom, leviathan, apiology, deconstruction, confluence, minutiae, onomatopoeia, tardy, ad infintum, tocophobia, cuckold, oblique and 110 more...
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Words of the Times
Words discovered while reading The New York Times, each with a citation from the paper.
testilying, ghost talk, apneist, solastalgia, izakaya, hooker, telectroscope, airflyte, phomance, bromhidrosis, stinky feet, cupping and 482 more...
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Biology
malacological, cladistic, phenetic, phylogenetic, taxonomy, bathypelagic, superfamily, superorder, infraorder, binomen, binominal, quorum sensing and 199 more...
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ologies
technology, zymology, zygology, zoophytology, zoophysiology, zoopathology, zoonosology, zoology, zoogeology, zooarchaeology, xylology, vulcanology and 850 more...
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Hana's Vocab
ipseism, jape, raphe, mullions and tran..., Olbers' Paradox, Euclidian torus, relativity of sim..., Cerenkov radiation, tachyon, superluminal, hapax legomenon, damascene and 314 more...
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Nest Words
structured and spacious words - literally and figuratively
nest, niche, nidification, nido, nestle, nye, patulous, inquiline, neb, coleoptera, aerie, nidicolous and 39 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for phenology.
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