Bridging data silos to holistically model plant macrophenology data, Contiguous United States, 2013-2021

Phenological responses to climate change can have dire implications for ecosystem functions. Despite the availability of diverse datasets (e.g., herbarium specimens, community science initiatives, observatory networks, and remote sensing), holistic modeling of plant events across scales remains limited due to fragmented data and disciplinary silos. This is an important topic that has been overdue for attention. Here we use two different plant phenological datasets, herbarium and USA-NPN (includes NEON), to look at the overall flowering period of Acer rubrum between 2013-2021, distributed across the Contiguous United States. We harmonize the data to demonstrate its use to leverage the spatial and biological organizational scales at which these data are captured. Both datasets include phenophase status (presence or absence) across the flowering season (day of year). These harmonized data exemplify their usefulness to holistically model plant phenology using an integrated species distribution model framework, while accounting for the heterogeneity across data types (presence-only, presence-absence). These data can be used to explore general questions about intraspecific synchrony of Acer rubrum flowering phenology across populations, or questions with coarser scales of interest (e.g., community level, global scales).