The New Year Plant Hunt is a yearly event held by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) that helps to record how plants are reacting to our changing climate. Over four days during the Christmas holidays, volunteers will simply head out for walks, of no more than 3 hours each, and record all species seen flowering. The aim of this citizen science project is to record all plants flowering in mid-winter, in order to help document the effects of climate change on plant phenology.
This year, a total of 1714 people took part in the event and over 14,000 plants were recorded blooming throughout Britain and Ireland. Botanists from TCD joined different local walks. Together with Cian White and fellow naturalists from UCD, we went for a nice walk… on a covered landfill site! Our goal was to study an area that wouldn’t necessarily be surveyed by a less committed group, and I think we did achieve this.
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