Monitor Berries

Monitoring berries is easy and fun. Not to mention it is important for understanding the effects of a changing environment on a tasty resource important for northern peoples and animals!

Here's how to do it:

1. Get trained. There are several options for training, including face-to-face training, e-training, or as a part of a 3-credit professional development course.
2. Select your site and berry species and provide basic information about it by submitting a site description form. This only needs to be done once.
3. Set up your site by tagging plants and conducting a berry density survey. This also only needs to be done once.
4. Collect data following the Winterberry observation protocol to collect data. You will collect weekly counts of berries and their condition until the snow falls and stays. It is important for us all to collect the data in the same way.
5. Submit your data. How many berries were still on your plants? You can submit your data online or with paper datasheets. Here's how.
6. Share stories. We'll publish an annual newsletter to report Winterberry scientific results, volunteer awards and milestones, and share stories across the citizen science network. We encourage all the volunteers to contact us with the stories and photos from their berry tracking experiences during Winterberry to include in the newsletter.