Elizabeth Levac, Full Professor in the Department of Environment and Geography at Bishop’s University, wants to get people to take a closer look at their trees through a citizen science project she is calling TreeTraque. Although Levac said that she has been working on research surrounding changes to the development of local trees due to climate change for a few years now, a particular opportunity presented itself in this spring of pandemic isolation.
“I was looking around at what sorts of projects were going on and I realized that nobody is recording the data for the different development stages of trees,” she said, noting that this kind of research requires a great deal of information over a long period of time in order to produce clear results. Given a situation where suddenly almost everyone was trapped at home with little to do, she said that the idea of asking people to observe and record information about nearby trees seemed like a good fit. “It’s always good to have as much data as possible,” she added.
The TreeTraque Project launched this spring based around a website, http://treetraque.ca/. Looking back, the researcher referred to the spring observation period as a trial run.
