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Abstract

Many scholars have argued that climate change is, in part, a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed. Discussions of time and environment are often interdisciplinary, necessitating a wide-ranging use of methods and approaches. However, to date there has been practically no direct engagement with the scientific field of phenology, the study of life-cycle timing across species, including plants, animals and insects. In this article, we outline how phenology can offer novel inroads to thinking through temporal relations across species and environments. We suggest that greater engagement with this field will enable scholars working across the humanities and social sciences to incorporate detailed studies of environmental timings which shed light on individual species, as well as wide-ranging species interactions. Following an overview of phenological research from both western scientific and indigenous knowledge perspectives, we report on a scoping exercise looking at where phenology has appeared in environmental humanities literature to date. We then offer an illustration that puts phenological perspectives into conversation with plant studies in order to indicate some of the useful affordances phenological perspectives offer, namely those of comprehending time as co-constructed across species and as flexible and responsive to environmental changes. We conclude by offering a number of further potential connections and suggestions for future research, including calling for more exploration of how environmental humanities approaches might produce critical contributions to phenology in their turn.

Keywords

Environmental humanities phenology critical plant studies time studies climate change

Around the globe, stories of environmental mismatches in timing are illustrating the complicated effects of climate change. In the Arctic, caribou may be arriving at their feeding grounds too late for peaks in new vegetation growth, with potentially devastating effects on new mothers and calves (Post and Forchhammer, 2008; Kerby and Post, 2013).¹ Atlantic puffins and European woodland birds may also be hatching chicks outside of the best times for catching prey (Burthe et al., 2012; Burgess et al., 2018). Worries about a ‘time out of joint’ apply not only to ecological contexts, but to social ones as well. Political cycles are thought to encourage short-term thinking, when the climate crisis demands sustained action (e.g. Hasselmann et al., 2003; Giddens, 2009). Seemingly ephemeral everyday practices are causing changes that will last into deep geological time (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014; Ginn et al., 2018; Farrier, 2020).

In the Western academy, and until relatively recently, the ‘time of social life’ has largely been studied separately from what has been designated the ‘time of nature’. The philosophical tradition, for example, has largely divided subjective time from objective time (Hoy 2009). While geography has also struggled with, and against, long-standing divisions between the ‘human’ and the ‘physical’, a division which has also shaped how (space)time has been conceived and studied (e.g. Massey 1999). However, the climate crisis has shown that social life cannot be conceived as distinct from the environment and has been the basis of rapprochement across these divides (e.g. Goudie 2017). Thus, increasing attention is being paid to better understanding and responding to temporal mismatches as part of addressing how we coordinate ourselves in a time of climate breakdown (e.g. Brace and Geoghegan 2010; Fincher et al. 2015). At issue, are efforts to move away from conceptualising time as a background to these intertwined social and ecological crises, and instead understand its constitution as relational and contested.

The significance of time for understanding climate change and shifts in more-than-human interrelations can be seen across the environmental humanities, where this paper situates itself, and cognate areas such as, more-than-human geographies, and multispecies studies. Here, researchers have shown how historical time has been irrevocably transformed by atmospheric carbon (Chakrabarty, 2009), reproductive time has been queered by microplastics (Davis, 2015), and how species extinction is breaking bonds of multi-species time (Rose, 2012). Anthropologist Tsing (2015) argues that rethinking time is central to developing possibilities for more flourishing and ethical ways of life. In The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) in particular, Tsing has focused attention on entangled forms of multi-species coordination across diverse temporal rhythms, framed as ‘polyphonic assemblages’. This focus is placed centrally to her efforts to cultivate ‘arts of noticing’. Further, Elaine Gan, writing with Tsing, has pointed to a need to understand the ways time participates in ‘how things hold’, and particularly how more-than-human communities “align with each other through timing to make living in common possible” (2018: 103). Gan and Tsing point out that asking
how things hold — is a significant shift from the classical concerns of both ecology and social science from the last century, when holding together was taken for granted and the important research questions addressed why things fall apart. (2018: 141)

This influential framing of ecological temporalities will be a touchstone for our paper and will be returned to subsequently. At the outset, though, we want to point out that, which research avenues might help us address issues of temporal (in)coordination in all their complexity, remains an open question.

To date, geological time has been key for engaging with the problem of temporality in the environmental humanities and social sciences (e.g. Clark, 2010; Ellsworth and Kruse, 2012). The capacity of geological time to enable an engagement with deep pasts and deep futures has been seen as essential for the present moment, with geologist Bjornerud (2018) even suggesting that ‘thinking like a geologist can help save the world’. In her book Timefulness, she advocates a ‘polytemporal’ thinking, which she locates in geologists’ abilities to read the landscape for its many concurrent histories and timescales. In the public more widely, she diagnoses a type of ‘chronophobia’ which encourages an ignorance about geologic timescales and what they mean for the time it takes to repair ecological damage, restore resources such as coal and oil, and how short our time here has been in the grand scheme of time (Bjornerud, 2018: 7). Indeed, the huge response to the proposal of the Anthropocene as a new geological age has shown the impact that concepts of time, originating in the sciences, can have on efforts to address current challenges. A common complaint, however, has been that Anthropocene debates are too often fixated on attempts to define and redefine the age of ‘man’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Davis and Todd, 2017). Indeed the proliferation of names that have arisen have often been in an attempt to drive a different golden spike, to argue for one temporal anchor point over another. This suggests that for all the richness of geological thinking, for scholars interested in re-conceptualising time, there is a need to avoid the reductive traps of chronology that keep reappearing within this framework.

Other proposals for addressing the crisis of time beyond a geologic framework, such as slower rhythms over fast, and longer term thinking over short, have been criticised for reducing time to a series of binary oppositions (Sharma, 2014; Vostal, 2017; Bastian, 2019). As Barbara Adam has emphasised, we need to move away from this kind of dualistic thinking since it impoverishes understandings of time. Instead, there is a need to explore how different temporal processes or times are entangled with each other through “hierarchical nesting and implication, with enfoldment and resonance” (Adam, 1994: 162). Adam (1998) thus criticises the failure to engage with social life as always characterised by multiple temporalities that impact and affect each other in varying ways, and time's role in coordinating relations amongst peoples and their environments.

In this article, we propose another avenue for the study of multispecies, ecological and climate change temporalities, which we argue shows much promise for addressing recently-emerged questions about timing and coordination. Specifically we are interested in the potential offered by the field of phenology, the scientific study of life-cycles and seasonal phenomena in plants and animals. In turning to this field, we are not claiming that it holds all the answers, but rather speaks to literary scholar Adam Barrows’ call to widen our interdisciplinary curiosity around ecological work on time (2019: 1314). We are also mindful of Massey’s (1999) caution against turning too readily to physics as an ultimate arbiter for how to conceptualise space and time. What happens when we instead engage in dialogue with ecologists and biologists about the nature of time? Phenology has been significantly overlooked within the humanities and social sciences to date and so our main interest is simply in drawing attention to the field as a new avenue for dialogue and stimulus. Further, concerned that environmental temporalities are frequently addressed metaphorically – we might think of the many musical metaphors utilised such as Tsing's ‘polyphony’ – we are keen to look for fields that can help us develop more substantive and detailed accounts.

As we will explore in this paper, phenology draws us directly into the ways that living beings participate in complex temporal interactions with each other, and with the temporalities of temperature, light, water and other abiotic elements in their environments. In seeking to understand processes of temporal ecology and the effects climate change has on them, phenology also explores how myriad forms of ecological timing makes shared life possible (or, to echo Gan and Tsing, ‘how things hold’) via the insights the field can provide on shifting food webs and species interactions. As historian of science Ashton Macfarlane (2021: 312) has argued, phenology can help to support a biological narrative of climate change, which so far has been dominated by narratives from the physical sciences, opening up important opportunities to rethink the political, conceptual and affective framings of climate change. Thus, we suggest that an explicit engagement with phenology can support more detailed conversations about the possibilities and limits of recalibrating time in a context of significant environmental disruption.

We say explicit engagement here, because while discussion of seasonal and life-cycle timing is, of course, not absent from humanities and social science work, an engagement with the field of phenology has been. Indeed many have never heard of the name of the research area. This means that its findings, methods, and open questions are not able to be easily engaged with by those studying closely related issues. As an initial step toward more detailed interdisciplinary conversations then, this paper offers the findings from a scoping exercise (including an extensive bibliography) that forms the first part of a larger project. Like more formal scoping studies, the aim was to rapidly map key concepts and identify resources that are available as a precursor to more detailed research (Arksey and O’Malley 2005, 21).² Limitations are thus inevitable, since the exercise does not aim to be systematic or evaluative. Even so, the approach is nonetheless useful in an understudied area like this one, since it gathers together relevant research, identifies gaps, and provides pointers for others starting in the area.

In what follows then, we introduce key themes and approaches of phenological research as seen, first in mainstream western science, and secondly from indigenous knowledge or TEK frameworks. In the case of the latter, indigenous knowledges about seasonal and multispecies timing inevitably exceeds the western scientific framing of phenology. In line with our aim to provide an initial map of relevant phenological research, however, we offer an overview of where there have been crossovers. Further, recognising the importance of identifying some of the limits of phenological approaches, we have particularly emphasised indigenous scholars’ critiques of the conceptual underpinnings of the field. Next, we survey the ways this field has (and has not) been drawn into work in the humanities and social sciences to date. Subsequently, and in order to demonstrate some of the intriguing possibilities offered, the second half of this paper suggests a range of examples where phenological work may have potential connections across the research interests of environmental humanities scholars. We then focus more closely on recent findings from the International Tundra Experiment, a long-term Arctic and sub-Arctic study, to demonstrate some of the specific resonances that arise, in this case with plant studies. We conclude by identifying a number of research questions that could be taken up in future work as pathways towards increased dialogue between these fields.

Phenology: definitions and understandings

Phenology – the study of the timing of seasonal and life cycle events – is an interdisciplinary field and is a principal way in which ecologists, biologists, biogeographers, biometerologists and climate scientists have investigated ecological relationships over time (Schwartz, 2013). It has also been significant within agricultural research, including for crop rotation, optimising yields, and timing of activities like irrigation, and applications of fertiliser and pesticides (Chmielewski, 2013). As a research field, it has had an uneven trajectory, growing out of millennia old practices of tracking plant and animal behaviours that, within western science, were first formalised in the mid-nineteenth century. This formalisation was motivated primarily by a post-Enlightenment interest in comparing periodic phenomena across sites and thus a need for a systematic approach to record-keeping and study (Demarée and Rutishauser, 2011). The hope was to discover underlying laws or rules within the seemingly ‘irregular’ animal and vegetal kingdoms (Morren quoted in, Demarée and Rutishauser, 2011: 757). During this period, large-scale monitoring networks were set up, including in Russia, the United Kingdom, what is now Germany, and briefly in the United States (Puppi, 2007). These networks kept records of phenological events, such as leaf out or flowering, across a number of species. However, over time, many (though not all) of these long-term data sets were abandoned (eg Strangeways, 2018: 87; Sparks et al., 2000), with concerns over costs and reliability of the data being cited as two reasons (Hall, 2015: 76).

Phenology has made a strong resurgence over the past three decades, however, with the once maligned record keeping involved now seen as providing much needed data for the study of climate change (Sparks et al., 2009).³ Indeed phenology has been proposed as “perhaps the simplest process in which to track changes in the ecology of species in response to climate change” (Walther et al., 2002: 389), a sentiment which has been reiterated in numerous IPCC reports (e.g. Rosenzweig et al., 2007: 99; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018: 216–221). Thus, there has been increasing attention to how anthropogenic climate change is causing significant shifts in the timings of behaviours and events – such as flowering, migration, or breeding – amongst species and environments (e.g. Dixon, 2003; Inouye, 2008). Further, phenology tells us not only about species responses to changing ecosystems, but can also be read as an indicator of climate change itself, where changing weather patterns are read through plant and animal behavior, reconnecting the field with its earlier placement within meteorology (Macfarlane, 2021: 319). It is also hoped that increased phenological knowledge will help with predicting, and proactively mitigating, climate change effects on ecosystems and thus feed into conservation strategies (Wolkovich et al., 2014b).

In terms of methods, phenology includes a range of approaches to analysis, including statistical methods (Hudson, 2010; Pearse et al., 2017), interpretation of long-term phenological data (Lawrence, 2009; Miller et al., 2021), futures modelling (Veloz et al., 2012) and physiological analysis (Hänninen, 1995). Underpinning these analyses are also many different forms of data collection. An important focus is the recording of the dates of standardised ‘phenophases’, such as bud burst in plants or key reproductive events in animals, often conducted via long-term observation of particular individuals. Here, phenological recording may involve citizen scientists, such as those contributing to the UK Woodland Trust's Nature's Calendar project (Collinson and Sparks, 2008; Lawrence, 2009), hired recorders, and/or academic researchers. Indeed it has been this history of close working with ‘amateurs’ that has at times placed phenology in uneasy relationship with other areas in biology and ecology (Macfarlane, 2021).

Phenology researchers also make use of experimental techniques in the laboratory (Primack et al., 2015), in the field (Oberbauer et al., 2013) and across the two (von Schmalensee et al., 2021). Here, environments are modified to study potential future responses. Further, to study changes at the macro level (landscape), and the meso level (ecological communities), additional techniques have been developed such as remote sensing where satellites provide estimates of increases in green cover (Studer et al., 2007), analysis of time-series photos from ‘phenocams’, such as cameras monitoring forest canopies (Klosterman et al., 2014) or drones used in large and inaccessible areas (Stanski et al., 2021). These shifts across scales from long-term intimate engagement, as seen in some citizen science recorders, to the potentially distanced experience of analysing satellite data, speak to environmental humanities concerns around how the epistemologies of conservation are constructed and lived (e.g. Reinert, 2013).

For humanities and social science researchers across plant studies, animal studies, multi-species studies and their cognate research areas, phenology promises many opportunities for understanding the specific lifeways of the beings at the focus of their study. To get a sense of some of the range of phenomena studied, plant phenology can focus on phenophases such as flowering (e.g. Craine et al., 2012), fruiting (e.g. Miller et al., 2021) and leaf-out times (e.g. Heberling et al., 2019). Plant-pollinator relationships constitute a further strand, illustrating the close relationships between plants and insects in ecology. Here phenologists have used these relationships to show how timing changes in one species can affect others (e.g. Kudo and Ida, 2013; Solga et al., 2014; Forrest, 2015). These changes are also spatially inflected, for example, as insects, and the plants they feed from, extend or contract their ranges due to temperature variations (Posledovich et al., 2018). Avian phenology has been conducted with reference to migratory habits (Clausen and Clausen, 2013), egg laying (Visser et al., 2012), and the availability of (invertebrate) food (Kwon et al., 2019), including complex issues such as identification of environmental cues that can help predict nest building or laying (Shutt et al., 2019). All manner of marine and terrestrial mammals are also studied within this framework including the phenology of whale migrations (Bailleul et al., 2012), leatherback turtle nesting (Neeman et al., 2015), moulting in elephant seals (de Kock et al., 2021), bat roosting and reproduction (Nurul-Ain et al., 2017) and hibernation in ground squirrels (Williams et al., 2014).

Further, while some long-term studies may focus on individual species, such as the Edith's checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha) (e.g. Singer and Parmesan, 2010), within contemporary phenology the changes in timing of a particular species are often contextualised with other events, such as environmental changes or early or delayed flowering (e.g. Olliff-Yang et al., 2020). This means that phenology can focus our attention on the specifics of how different species are caught up in, and indeed participating in, ecosystem changes across land, sea and sky. As Forrest and Miller-Rushing note:
At its simplest, phenology is merely the temporal dimension of natural history. However, this temporal dimension is critical, because it determines the stage of development reached by an organism or population at the time when it intersects with particular components of its environment. (Forrest and Miller-Rushing, 2010:3101)

Since many species initiate phenological events based on interactions with other species, phenology thus entails an (often periodic) events-based and cross-species understanding of time. Moreover, phenological requirements should not be understood separately from the spatial, since they can also help explain why species are where they are, and what possibilities there are for movement and adaptation (Chuine, 2010).

In keeping with its interdisciplinary nature, some have proposed a genetic basis for phenology (Wilczek et al., 2010), suggesting that evolutionary biologists may contribute to the field. Time, as understood by phenologists, thus straddles timing aspects considered more fixed, such as those determined strongly by genetics, versus flexible responses to stimuli within the life cycle of an individual. Of course, what is fixed and what is plastic is not itself stable, since evolutionary timings can change across generations, and conversely phenological changes may drive evolutionary responses (Forrest and Miller-Rushing, 2010). Combining mechanistic and evolutionary approaches has thus been suggested (Visser and Gienapp, 2019) and Rafferty et al. (2013) advocate for a combination of approaches to allow scaling up from cross-species interactions to communities and ecosystems.

Alongside this wide array of research, it is useful to note that there have been a range of biases which have left key areas relatively neglected. One of the most noted within the field is the extensive research on spring phenology from temperate to Arctic climates, and yet little research focused on phenological processes occurring in the autumn (Gallinat et al., 2015). This has meant that significant activities occurring during this period are understudied, such as fruit and nut ripening, hibernation and migration, and increases in pest attacks. There has also been a significant geographical bias towards temperate regions, in contrast to tropical phenology for example (Abernethy et al., 2018; Sakai and Kitajima, 2019). The perception in the Global North of a clearer distinction between seasons in temperate regions compared to other climates has been one explanation for the research gap, with timing in tropical ecosystems being more diverse, responsive to a wider variety of cues, and less closely aligned to overarching seasonal phenomena (Abernethy et al., 2018). However, the differences in research resources between the Global North and Global South must, of course, also be taken into account here.

Indeed, climate change is predicted to cause the most extreme phenological shifts in tropical and polar regions (Parmesan, 2006; Kwon et al., 2019), as well as in marine environments (Sydeman and Bograd, 2009). Thus, phenology researchers such as Wolkovich et al. (2014a) have suggested that further research and data collection outside temperate mid-latitudes is necessary; similarly, calls for multi-sited and regional phenological studies have been made (Ibáñez et al., 2010). New networks such as the African Phenology Network have been created to build research on the continent.⁴ The focus on temperate climates in phenological research to date may thus have offered a skewed perception of how temporal co-ordinations operate within ecosystems; a bias towards temperate regions (particularly in the Global North) which has also been pointed out in the environmental humanities (DeLoughrey et al., 2015).

Indigenous phenological knowledge

While the western scientific approaches to phenology we have discussed above have been largely absent from the environmental humanities (discussed further below), there has been a clear thread arising from indigenous scholars, sometimes with settler researchers, on the importance of thinking climate change from the perspective of embedded more-than-human temporalities (e.g. Rose, 2012; Bawaka Country et al., 2020). As a result, our scoping study looked carefully at the literature available on traditional phenological knowledge (TPK) – sometimes known as ethnophenology, defined by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabham as “the cultural perception of the timing of recurrent natural history events” (2010: 1). Within this framework we find work arguing for a deeper engagement with traditional ecological knowledge, as well as TPK, in order to understand phenological changes at the (human) community and local ecosystem levels (Turner and Spalding, 2013; Kupika et al., 2019; Kenote, 2020). Many benefits arising from the integrative approaches to seasonal and phenological time within TPK are described, including new data sets and novel indicators for tracking changes caused by climate heating, such as looking to indicator species like night-flowering jasmine (Acharya, 2011) or red millipedes to predict rainfall (Fitchett and Ebhuoma, 2018). Many of these studies thus propose an important role for indigenous knowledges in climate change adaptation (Woodward et al., 2012; Hosen et al., 2020), suggesting that collaborations between indigenous communities, climate scientists and social scientists are central to anticipating and responding to timing shifts related to climate change (Turner and Clifton, 2009; Rarai et al., 2022).

One way that indigenous phenological knowledge has been described, shared and researched in a relatively integrated way, has been through work on local calendars. Known variously as seasonal, traditional, ecological or phenological calendars, these tools focus on identifying key local phenological indicators of environmental change such as the jasmine or millipedes just mentioned. Environmental cues, such as the emergence of different species or weather events, are used to judge the best timing for harvest, planting, burning, etc., as well as for the social and community activities intertwined throughout the year (e.g. Mondragón, 2004; Woodward, 2008; Lefale, 2010; McKemey et al., 2021). Work has explored how these calendars and their diverse temporal logics may cause clashes with the dominant Gregorian calendar, particularly since key timings are judged in terms of the local context rather than somewhat arbitrary fixed dates (Retnowati et al., 2014; Nakano, 2020). On the other hand, there are also arguments for the ability of locally attuned calendars to offer increased resilience and anticipatory capacity (Prober et al., 2011; Kassam et al., 2018). Understandings of time through these calendars is embodied (Bulbulshoev et al., 2011) and cosmological (Clarke, 2009), integrating human communities into the rhythms and seasons of their ecological relations. Some of this work has also explored the issue of seasonality from a humanities perspective, including Ryan (2013), for instance, who describes a combination of phenomenological and phenological approaches involved in the promotion of endemic seasons in regions of Australia through land-based, indigenous calendars (see also Hatley, 2013 and Fischer and Macauley 2021).

Notably, we found very little work on seasonal calendars arising from Western cultural contexts (although see Ahas et al., 2000; Kammen, 2004; and the Calendars Project based in Norway https://www.uib.no/en/calendars-project). This arguably contributes to the continuation of romanticised ideals of indigenous knowledges and extractive approaches. Indeed, a number of indigenous researchers have been highly critical of the emerging definitions and approaches of ethnophenology and have argued for a TPK that is led by indigenous peoples in the service of their own goals and sovereignty (Hatfield et al., 2018; Kenote, 2020). This includes exhortations that the enthusiasm for new data sets must take issues of data sovereignty more seriously (Kenote, 2020: 64–65), and criticisms that a utilitarian approach that treats phenological knowledge as separable from cultural, community and spiritual practices and knowledges, turns TPK into an extractable resource for western science (Hatfield et al., 2018: 1). In contrast, indigenous researchers have argued for more holistic approaches, which cannot be reduced to ‘cultural perceptions of timing’ as Nabhan has suggested.

Instead, it is argued that TPK should be understood as an integral part of indigenous lifeways, guiding principles and values with which communities are governed, experienced and given form (Kenote, 2020: 41). Refusing to extract phenological data from the social-cultural context emphasises, for example, the way that disruptions to phenological processes
are not merely an inconvenience or a set of information; instead, they challenge the fundamental belief about how elements of the natural world are connected, as well as the timing of when traditional patterns occur and behaviors are performed. (Hatfield et al., 2018: 6)

Further, there have been criticisms of the abstract time used in western phenology, which may fundamentally distort the way data is collected and analysed. As Hatfield et al. (2018) argue, the retention of a notion of northern hemisphere spring tied to the months of March, April, May does not accord with Indigenous TEK views of seasonality. In the latter, the focus is on timing and connections between ecological phenomena, where seasons emerge from relational timings (e.g. first autumn freeze, snow melt), rather than a set time in the Gregorian calendar (Hatfield et al., 2018: 7).⁵ Indeed some western phenologists are also pointing to the unsuitability of dominant linear temporal frameworks for understanding ecological timing (Sagarin, 2001; Wolkovich et al., 2021), suggesting that a deeper exploration of the philosophy of phenology and the underpinning conceptions of time is needed.

Phenology and seasonality in the humanities and social sciences

Next, we turn to our survey of environmental humanities literature, as well as related areas such as more-than-human geographies, environmental history, and multispecies ethnography, to map where phenology has entered current debates. Although many scholars point out the ubiquity and importance of time and temporality in socio-environmental relations (e.g. Adam, 1998; Wood, 2008), these conversations appear to have occurred without any engagement with phenology. Indeed our review found only twenty research contributions which drew explicitly on phenology, with most only appearing in the last five or so years. We did identify work that dealt with cognate areas, and so in this section we also briefly discuss examples of work on seasonality. As mentioned in the introduction, we recognise the wider availability of scholarship on multispecies, ecological and climate change temporalities, including implicit engagement with phenological issues such as mismatch. However, in keeping with our interest in collating resources for engaging with phenology explicitly, we discuss only the subset of work that falls within these parameters.

So, aside from the few articles on phenology from history of science that we located (Stoller, 1956; Puppi, 2007; Hall, 2015; Macfarlane, 2021), our scoping exercise identified a cluster of works in literary studies where a key theme was the reconsideration of prominent nature writers from the 18^th and 19^th centuries (although see Millar 2021 on Pliny the Elder). This may be partly due to phenologists’ own return to historical phenological records collected by naturalists, such as Henry David Thoreau, to demonstrate the effects of global warming (e.g. Miller-Rushing and Primack, 2008), as well as the recovery and reconsideration of Thoreau's later works by literary theorists themselves (Finley 2015). Literary scholar, poet and co-director of a project making Thoreau's phenological records publically available, Kristen Case, provides a key example here.

Case's works (2013; 2014; 2017) challenge, what she describes as the distaste with which Thoreau's “Kalendar” has aroused. By tracking his own activities such as “First leave off great coat” as well as meteorological and biological timing, his phenological records have historically been understood as neither scientific nor literary enough for either group to make use of. In contrast, Case argues for reading Thoreau's notes, journals and Kalendar – together with his practices of daily observational walking – as a co-shaping form of ‘writing’ that challenges the binaries of human/non-human, nature/culture, ideal/material. This ‘writing’, according to Case, provides a particularly useful model for environmental humanities, ecocriticism and environmental justice work (2017, 266).

Literary critic Dimick (2018) also argues that the writings of Aldo Leopold and Thoreau should be read in conjunction with their phenological observations, since together they produce what she calls a ‘seasonal form’. That is, writing which shifts from well-ordered, if static, chronological lists to a ‘fully realized climactic narrative’ when placed within current understandings of a shifting and changing climate (p702). Communications scholar Barnett (2019) also examines the phenological writings and record-keeping of Leopold, although in this case the focus is on how the use of social media and smartphones by citizen phenologists can mediate a more attentive relationship with local environments. Ecocritic Williams (2017) focuses on the journals of eighteenth-century English naturalist Gilbert White, who also made phenological observations, and interestingly ties the everyday process of recording central to phenology to a “radical ecological consciousness” (p 453); conceived as an embodied mode of everyday enquiry which is responsive to changing environmental patterns. Finally, Jackson-Houlston (2002) explores the phenological accuracy of Thomas Hardy's botanical descriptions reading them in light of Dutch ‘flower’ paintings which often ignored seasonality altogether.

Turning to the environmental history of timekeeping, Kate Wersan (2017; 2019) highlights the use of non-clock timekeeping practices in eighteenth and nineteenth century gardening and agriculture, including the tracking of phenophases of the early melon where a variety of techniques forced the production of fruit very early in the season. From an art research perspective, Gan employs diagrams as a tool to explore multi-species temporalities in a satayoma forest in Japan (Gan and Tsing, 2018), including life cycles and seasonal rhythms. While no mention of phenology is made here, in a recent book chapter on her diagram method, Gan (2021: 113) makes this link explicit. Drawing on multispecies ethnography to inform design for reflection, Smith et al. (2017) analyze The Phenology Clock created by artists Natalie Jeremijenko, Jake M Richardson, Tega Brain, and Blacki Li Rudi Migliozzi. Other examples include brief mentions, such as Portus and McGinn (2019) who note the problem of phenological mismatch in their discussion of bee decline. More practically focused were reflections on designing phenological exercises as part of humanities pedagogical approaches such as in Irvine’s (2014) discussion of teaching environmental literature via ‘cognitive phenology’ and Lloro-Bidart’s (2015) mention of the use of phenological observation as part of ecofeminist science education.

Because of the fragmented nature of these interdisciplinary approaches to phenology, we also considered work on seasonality from an environmental humanities perspective which offers another opportunity to build stronger connections with phenology. Although we note that seasonality too has been much neglected in certain areas of the humanities, such as philosophy (Fisher and Macauley 2021, 5–6, although see Ryan as cited previously). Of the literature we sourced here, most was largely without significant reference to ecology or phenology but provide points where greater engagement might be developed (e.g. Houser, 2016). Krause (2015) demonstrates that seasons in Finnish Lapland are better understood as ‘rhythms’ rather than blocks of time, connecting to our above discussion of TPK. Similarly, Peacock (2012) addresses Seasonal Affective Disorder in ecopoetry, and Rowland (2019) identifies a literary indigenous temporality attuned to cycles of the seasons. Phillips (2020) highlights the multispecies temporalities involved in beekeeping, including seasonal cycles and rhythms. Brice (2014) considers how humans become attuned to the activities of grapevines to temporally coordinate wine production. In this case in particular, there is a useful opportunity to articulate this work in phenological terms, in part because one of the longest series of phenological records in the world, spanning more than 1000 years, exist for grape vines in Europe (Jones, 2013). Anthropologist Whitehouse (2017) views seasonality in the United Kingdom as formed through relationships between humans and more-than-humans, by drawing on accounts of people's interactions with birds; here, a brief mention of phenology is made, and it would be interesting to see what might be further drawn out if the understanding of time and temporality were grounded in explicit engagement with the field. Thus, while work such as Dimick's and Portus and McGinn's draws upon phenology to a greater or lesser extent to illustrate that writers and artists have used seasonal and environmental rhythms to establish aesthetic structure, drawing on phenology at all remains rare in the humanities and social sciences, let alone explicitly turning to the field to understand temporality. This is so even when considering seasonality, and despite the potentially productive relationship across the fields.

Opportunities for connection and dialogue

Given the lack of dialogue between phenology and the environmental humanities to date, we now turn to a range of opportunities for finding connections between the ways that phenologists view time and influential writings on time in the environmental humanities. In line with our aim to provide initial steps towards more interdisciplinary dialogue, these suggestions are preliminary, but offer generative ways into an enrichment of both the environmental humanities and phenology. For example, efforts to think time as co-constructed, changeable and dependent on cross-species relations might be developed via work such as Inouye et al. (2019), who argue for a process model in phenology that moves away from individual events towards more complex interactions between species and environment. Further, phenology considers the quality of temporal relationships, including how well they support the species involved and the flexibility within them, where the relative alignment of these relationships has consequences for the wellbeing and survival of whole populations or even species. Extinctions thus loom large within phenology, offering useful approaches to those in environmental humanities working on extinction threats and temporalities (e.g. Rose et al., 2017; Farrier, 2019; Schuster, 2019). Phenology thus takes into account the temporal relations between species and the consequences of the disturbance of these relations; an aim shared by much work in the environmental humanities and social sciences. The discipline also considers relations at both species (e.g. Davenport et al., 2014) and community levels (Moya-Laraño, 2011; Nakazawa and Doi, 2012; Visser and Gienapp, 2019), so may be useful for addressing the issues of scalability and making extensive temporalities tangible which have been foregrounded in the environmental humanities, as mentioned earlier in the work of Tsing (2015) and Bjornerud (2018).

Noticing and tracking phenological changes is also a central issue of concern across the scientific literature, whether this be through computational modelling (Tang et al., 2016), the use of historic phenological records (Ellwood et al., 2010; Primack and MacKenzie, 2020; Miller et al., 2021 – which all draw on Thoreau's phenological records), or citizen science (Pearse et al., 2017). This is a further juncture at which phenology and the environmental humanities might productively operate; anthropological or cultural approaches may help to identify how species or environmental changes are being registered within human societies and raise awareness of these changes beyond scientific communities. Phenologists also often suggest that tracking changing timing in plants and animals can enable those who currently feel unaffected by climate change to sense it happening in their own environs. Far from climate change as the ‘hyperobject’ then, it is capable of being experienced within people's own lifeworlds. Additionally, the acoustic phenological changes noted by Monczak et al. (2020), and Farina et al. (2021), find their parallel in Impey’s (2021) and Portus and McGinn's work on social and cultural understandings of seasonality and phenology through sound (see also Jenkins, 2021), and wider concerns around the relations between environments, sound (Browning, 2020) and music (Hawitt, 2020).

Phenological events both mark and drive environmental time through sequences and (a)synchrony (Rose, 2012). While much literature on time and environment implicitly uses language which is reminiscent of work in phenology (e.g. ‘seasonality’, ‘synchrony’, ‘environmental cues’), further grounding in scientific literature may offer a clearer conceptualisation of how time operates in changing environments. Likewise the interest in ecocritical readings from indigenous temporal frameworks (DeLoughrey, 1999; Rowland, 2019) could also benefit from attention to TPK and related areas. We argue that doing so would further foster the interdisciplinarity to which scholars in the environmental humanities aspire.

Taking a closer look at phenology and plant studies

To provide a brief illustration of how an engagement with phenology could be useful, we now consider a particular case in more detail and discuss a study of changing plant timings in the Arctic (Collins et al., 2021). This will take us deeper into the problem of ‘how things hold’ and our understandings of how time and timing play a role in adaptation to change. We contextualise this study within current work on critical plant studies in particular, and within the broad umbrella of environmental humanities, to continue to build a picture of the wide range of debates that phenology could enter into. We want to complicate our understanding of what an attention to multispecies temporalities can uncover, moving beyond broad gestures towards environmental rhythms, the cycle of seasons or musical metaphors.

With the growth of interest in animal studies in the social sciences and humanities, there has been concern about the lack of attention to plant-life. A range of works have unpacked the philosophical basis of this entrenched ‘plant awareness disparity’ (Parsley 2020) in theories of culture, value and ethics (e.g. Hall, 2011). Importantly this lack of attention has a temporal element, with plants particularly subject to the broader treatment of nature as passive and thus outside of time, as part of Western progress narratives that grants agency and activity only to some (Bastian, 2009). Thus, even while the seasonality of plants and their cycles of growth are celebrated, as Hustak and Myers point out, they are also envisioned as static in contrast to the human and nonhuman animals that move through and shape the world (Hustak and Myers, 2012: 80; see also Schrader, 2012: 87). In contrast to plants as emblems of a passive stasis (as they were paradigmatically described in Aristotle's work), there has been widespread interest in the varieties of ways that plants respond to and shape their environments (e.g. Head et al., 2014), including how to reshape methods in the humanities and social sciences to study these issues (e.g. Pitt, 2015; Myers, 2015; Elton, 2021).

The phenological work we discuss speaks to two themes that have been prominent in critical plant studies. The first is the shift in conceiving of plants as place-bound to mobile (Head et al., 2015). Here we might think of work on invasive species and their ability to travel in unexpected and unmanageable ways (Atchison, 2019), including the ways their varying temporalities support this mobility (Atchison and Head, 2013: 964). A second theme is that of plants’ ‘flexible bodies’ where plant identity is described as moving across boundaries seen as more fixed in human and other animals and more clearly troubling distinctions between “self and non-self, fixture and indeterminacy, and individual and collective form” (Head et al., 2015: 404). This concern can also be seen in Hustak and Myers’ discussion of plants in terms of ‘distributed, decentralized bodies’ where plants challenge the notion of a singular identity in one body and instead are ‘extensive’ and ‘entangling’ (2012: 81; see also Sandilands, 2021).

To place phenology into conversation with these concerns, we want to draw attention to recent research on the effects of warming on Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystems (Collins et al., 2021). We will first describe the study before drawing out the various implications for plant studies. In their paper, Collins et al. draw together a wide range of research on tundra plant phenology which has experimented with the effects of warming on key plants in Arctic, sub-Arctic and alpine ecosystems. The International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) was initiated in the late 1990s with the aim of monitoring phenological changes in a part of the world that was already predicted to be most affected by climate change (Henry and Molau, 1997). Changes have been tracked in response to climate variations, but also via experimental warming sites where plants have been grown in situ in open top chambers (OTC) which act like cold frames. Because standardised processes were adopted early on, data from across a large number of sites is available for cross-comparison. Some analysis of the data has shown that tundra plants have responded to warming temperatures by moving key phenophases earlier (Jabis et al., 2020). However, it has also shown that the changes are very complex, differing across plant types and the shifting impact of multiple ecosystem factors (Oberbauer et al., 2013).

The recent paper from Collins et al. tests the hypothesis that the phenology of individual plants is responsive to multiple and differing pressures; that is, that the phenology of different parts of the plant responds to different pressures. Challenging the largely implicit assumption that all a plant's phenophases will shift in unison, the team instead explored how reproductive phenology (flowering, seeding) diverged from vegetative phenology (leaf out or green up and leaf drop or leaf senescence). In proposing their hypothesis, Collins et al. point to the theory that these aspects of plants have each adapted to different evolutionary pressures, since “flowering has likely co-evolved with pollinators while leaf phenology is influenced by herbivore pressure” (2021: 2). In support they point to the fact that plant species that are linked with specific early pollinators via spring flowering are more likely to be able to advance their flowering as warming increases, compared to those that flower in the summer who can depend on a broader range of insects to pollinate them (Collins et al., 2021: 2). Many questions remain, including more detailed knowledge of the changes happening towards the end of the season, and whether advancing reproductive timing causes all other plant timings to shift in unison.

The findings from this research confirm the hypothesis of diverging timing within plant species and are summarised neatly as follows:
Broadly, reproductive phenophases shifted earlier and by a larger magnitude than vegetative phenophases with experimental warming…and divergent responses of green up and leaf senescence suggest a lengthening of species’ vegetative growing seasons. (Collins et al., 2021: 5)

This means that “tundra phenology responses to warming may be specific to plant tissue-type” (Collins et al., 2021: 5). They suggest that the reason why reproductive plant tissues are shifting more than vegetative tissues may be because there is a greater need for flowering to be timed to overlap with pollinator phenology, than there is need for leaf-out to adapt to the current changes.

A key consequence for humanities and social science scholars is that while it has become common to talk about multispecies temporalities in terms of individual species – Mark Winston's Bee Time (2014) comes to mind – this study shows that this is a shorthand we must not read too much into. If Collins et al.'s work suggested that the unison hypothesis held out, that is that all phenophases moved together, then perhaps we could justifiably talk about there being a species level time such as ‘Arctic bell-heather time’ (with Cassiope tetragona being one of the key plant species in the study). To the contrary, what was found suggests a relational process where the timing of some parts of the plant are guided by a need to make a common time with pollinators, even as the pollinators themselves are shifting in response to changing temperature patterns. The time at stake is thus a ‘pollinator-bell-heather’ time. Indeed, the research suggests that reproductive timing in these plants is distinctly flexible, shifting faster than vegetative timing as conditions change. At the same time, vegetative parts of the plant are attending to other relational factors such as herbivore pressures, which encourage different temporal tactics, in this case an ability to extend the period of a growing season, but in a less dramatic way. Here we see critical plant studies work on mobility extended to a temporal mobility, not simply a mobility across time, but in terms of timing, rates of change and adaptability.

Collins et al. take us through a wide range of implications arising from these shifts and we will address only some of these, again just to gain a taste of how phenological work can bring more depth to our understandings of more-than-human temporalities. First, the diverging shifts within the plant mean that wider worries about phenological mismatch, or times out of joint, may not only happen between species, but within species as well. That is, if a species’ vegetation timing shifts only a little, but flowering advances much earlier, the period between green up and flowering may be squeezed, leaving less time for plants to build up resources to support flowering, fruiting and seeding (Collins et al., 2021: 5). At the same time, we are reminded that some plant species store up resources from the previous year to utilise in early spring and so may not be affected.⁶ This variety of temporal tactics, which may exacerbate or mitigate against mismatches in internal timings, adds further layers to the critical plant studies move to conceptualise plants as decentralised by showing how this manifests temporally, as well as spatially or bodily.

Secondly, the ‘extensive’ and ‘entangling’ aspects of plants are very much apparent in this research. For example, while there is more emphasis on the relationship with pollinators, the study also found that another key factor shaping flowering time was soil dryness, with water stress also encouraging early flowering. The layering of temperature increases, leading to earlier snow melts and higher evaporation rates again shifts not only the pollinator-plant temporalities, but also the snow-water-plant ones (Collins et al., 2021: 7). Another divergence found was in the timing of seed dispersal, which was more attuned to the contingent temperature shifts the plant experienced at the time of this phenophase, suggesting a sun-warmth-seed-plant time. Cascades of other potentially concerning effects continue, including for the possibility of continued muskox-forage-plant times or caribou-forage-plant times, particularly when foragers might have preferences for seeds over leaves. Climate change temporalities might also be at play in terms of carbon-plant times where carbon uptake in the Arctic and subArctic may be increasing with longer growing periods, with knock on effects for global carbon budgets. (But it might not. It's complicated). Thus one of the conclusions of the paper are that further studies are needed to understand the temporalities of interacting species together, particularly insect and plant phenologies (Collins et al., 2021: 7).

Thus far we have briefly shown how this study helps to unpack ideas of non-singular identity and temporal agency in plants in more detailed ways. One further application is to reconsider the nature of multi-species coordinations which we mentioned at the outset of our paper. In describing her conception of ‘polyphonic assemblages’, Tsing's central metaphor for conceptualising multispecies temporalities (2015: 23–24), she writes that this alternative blueprint for time is adopted from musical styles such as the madrigal or the fugue “in which autonomous melodies intertwine” (our emphasis, 2015: 23). Further when first encountering this style Tsing describes herself as being “forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together” (underline is our emphasis, italics in original, 2015: 23). This interplay between related but separate melodies – forming patterns that might be harmonious, but also might not – shapes the conceptualisation of ecological communities that Tsing makes use of. However, the phenological research we have examined here presents the nature of multispecies temporalities in a very different light. Rather than being a separate characteristic of each member of an ecosystem, time is made in situ across the interactions between the biotic and abiotic. Like the wider understanding of plant life in critical plant studies, multi-species temporalities appear as mobile, flexible, extensive and entangling. Given the prominence of Tsing's work for thinking multispecies worlds, this suggests that more detailed research conversations are needed to clarify the conceptual underpinnings of notions like multispecies time. We argue that anchoring these discussions in a critical engagement with phenology could enliven and enrich our understandings, moving them beyond appealing metaphors towards more detailed, and potentially more surprising, analyses.

Conclusion

In sum, we hope to have demonstrated that phenology is a fascinating area of study that is significantly under-utilised in research on multi-species, ecological and climate change temporalities outwith the sciences. We have suggested that phenology presents a view of time that offers contrasting affordances to those offered by geological time. Its framing suggests understandings of time as arising through webs of mutable interactions, negotiations and experiences. Time in this context arises from interactions between living beings and their environments; it is variable within the life cycle of individuals, and operates across the microscale to the macroscale.

Moreover, the concept that has travelled most readily outside the field of phenology, namely the notion of phenological mismatch or asynchrony with which we opened our paper, leads us directly into the problem of those processes of coordination that make shared life possible. We learn that some temporal alignments, from a phenological perspective, ‘work better’ than others, with unprecedented mismatch leading to significant consequences across trophic levels in an ecosystem (e.g. Saalfeld and Lanctot, 2017; Renner and Zohner, 2018; Damien and Tougeron, 2019). We also learn about phenological specialists and generalists, such as how those species who have specialised around a certain temporal niche may be more at risk of pressures from invasive species (Wolkovich and Cleland, 2014), or how population size alone might not be a reliable safeguard against extinction threats if there is not sufficient temporal flexibility to change behaviors and life history traits as a species’ climatic niche changes (Anderson et al., 2013). Thus, we see that the seemingly steady backdrop of ‘natural time’, can quickly become ‘out of time’, misaligned by relatively short-term (anthropogenic) action causing much longer-lasting effects. Thus, in its study of how plants and animals coordinate with the environments around them, phenology can focus attention on modes of telling time that are not abstract, standardised or distant from everyday life, but are directly responsive to environmental change

A number of further conceptual questions from within phenology also resonate with key environmental humanities concerns. The problem of phenological mismatch, for example, can also contribute to critiques of the romantic view of a synchronised nature (Worster, 1990). For example, the extent of phenological asynchrony due to climate change and the effects on ecological communities beyond the individual species level remains largely unknown (Migliavacca et al., 2012; Kharouba et al., 2018; Lindén, 2018) and there have been suggestions that the negative consequences of mismatches may have even been overstated. Singer and Parmesan (2006), for example, question the assumption of synchrony as a baseline and emphasise the importance of evolved asynchrony, even within mutualistic interactions, such as where one species is not able to precisely predict the timing of the other. Questions of scale similar to those in the environmental humanities also arise (Diez et al., 2012; Park et al., 2021): how, for example, can the timing of events be observed and understood at the community, landscape or ecosystem level?

In terms of how work in humanities and social science might in turn contribute to phenology, this is very much an open question. It is important to remember that phenology operates within wider disciplines, such as ecology, which have arguably favoured the spatial over the temporal (Wolkovich et al., 2014b; Yang, 2020). This suggests that the project of putting the temporal and the spatial into conversation, such as we see in human geography, can contribute concepts and analytical approaches for challenging this divide. Internally to phenology, there have been a range of arguments around the lack of an explicit guiding criteria for phenological methodologies (Chmura et al., 2019; Cerro and Holloway, 2021). There is thus a strong interest in identifying and developing the conceptual frameworks underpinning phenology, suggesting a need for a more explicit philosophy of phenology which specifies what is meant by key temporal terms, as well as how biotic communities and forms of interaction are conceptualised. Further, given that much phenological research emphasises reproductive events, what might an engagement with queer temporalities and queer ecology inspire? And while the emphasis in this paper has been on time as responsive and adaptive, could a greater exploration of uses of phenology in agriculture show a more concerning picture, as in Sophie Chao's discussions with her Marind interlocutors of the ‘terrifying atemporality’ of oil palm plantations (2022, 173)?⁷ Precisely how environmental humanities scholarship can inform phenological work is therefore a rich area for future consideration.

Throughout this paper, Gan and Tsing's question of ‘how things hold’ has been a repeating motif, emphasising the importance of considering how time plays a role in the ways that more-than-human communities adapt to changing circumstances. As Gan and Tsing write: “If we are interested in the dynamics of livability—rather than efficient resource use—coordination in this sense is key: it keeps livable assemblages alive” (2018: 133). We have questioned how we go about understanding these co-ordinations in all their specificity and complexity. Thus, we have sought to provide an initial framework for how phenological research – in its variety of manifestations – could enable better understandings of how temporal innovations and flexibilities might contribute to more liveable worlds, even while acknowledging that it may also present limits and barriers. We invite other researchers to see what such a critical engagement might bring to their own projects.

Highlights

The field of phenology has been largely neglected in the environmental humanities, and yet it offers productive perspectives on time and environment.

The environmental humanities and phenology share a concern for multispecies relations and for what happens when these relations become disentangled.

Initiating a dialogue across these fields will support more complex interdisciplinary research into climate change temporalities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Elise Gallois, Isla Myers-Smith, and Ally Phillimore for their helpful comments and feedback on drafts of the manuscript. Any errors are our own. Thanks also to the Independent Social Research Foundation for providing flexible, warm and generous support for new interdisciplinary endeavors.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation,

ORCID iDs

Michelle Bastian

Rowan Bayliss Hawitt

Notes

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Multi-species,ecological and climate change temporalities: Opening a dialogue with phenology

Abstract

Keywords

Phenology: definitions and understandings

Indigenous phenological knowledge

Phenology and seasonality in the humanities and social sciences

Opportunities for connection and dialogue

Taking a closer look at phenology and plant studies

Conclusion

Highlights

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

References