Plantwatch is an expansion of the ongoing Alberta Wildflower Survey, which since 1987 has involved over 200 volunteers in recording bloom dates for 15 native plants.
Newsletters go out twice a year to observers, and data is reported by mail at summer's end.
Plantwatch observers are asked to select plants away from buildings on level ground, and to report microclimate details such as relative sunny-ness of location. To reduce variability, data for a region is averaged. Plant flowering is easy to observe. In any given year, the sequence of development of organisms is largely predictable. This is also true across trophic levels, so that the best predictor of when a particular insect will emerge can be the timing of bloom of a plant many days before.