Seasonal Ecological Calendars

The neighbourhood structures can also be aggregated temporally to produce seasonal ecological calendars using the following workflow:

These calendars summarise the mean normalised activity of ecological neighbourhoods through the year, allowing broader community-scale seasonal structure to be visualised directly.

Rather than focusing on individual taxa, they attempt to expose larger seasonal ecological modes, including:

• Winter visitor activity
• Spring flowering and emergence periods
• Resident detectability dynamics
• Extended summer assemblages
• Autumn transitional structure

The resulting heatmaps provide a view of how different regions of seasonal ecological space become active, overlap, and decline through the ecological year:

Toward a Seasonal Ecology of Place

These models do not attempt to explain ecosystems in full. Instead, they provide a way of describing seasonal ecological structure using a common mathematical language. In doing so, they allow long-term observational records to be explored not only as individual species histories, but as components of a larger seasonal ecological system.