not even in his wildest dreams would an amateur phenologist assume that his records would aid modern, scientific climate change studies. But this is happening. Records of amateur phenologists are proving to be invaluable to researchers studying climate changes (www.nature.com, January 2, 2002). Worldwide, researchers are combining the amateur records with climate data, to reveal how, for example, changes in temperature affect the arrival of spring. One such researcher is Terry Root, an ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, usa. She has collected bird watchers' counts of wildfowl taken between 1955 and 1996 on seasonal ponds in the American Midwest and combined them with climate data and models of future warming. Her analysis shows that the increased droughts that the models predict could halve the breeding populations at the ponds. "The number of waterfowl in North America will most probably drop significantly with global warming,' she says.

Overall, such endeavours have helped to show that a number of natural events