Faculty Notes | John Withey | 2022-2023

John Withey has a new co-authored teaching case, ‘Can Birds “Keep Up” with Earlier Springs?’ published online in December 2022 by the National Science Teaching Association. The teaching case study uses estimates of spring green-up and spring arrival of migratory birds across Eastern North America calculated for a research article by Casey Youngflesh, John’s co-author on the teaching case (Youngflesh et al. 2021). Some of the learning objectives are for students to be able to explain what phenology is, hypothesize as to how and why ecological systems might be responding to phenological changes, and develop one or more researchable questions about the phenological shifts covered in the case study. The case study makes use of the interactive web site Migratory Sensitivity and students need to answer questions based on visualizations and plots they find there. This publication is part of a continuing collaboration studying ‘phenological mismatch’ across three trophic levels (plants, insects, and birds).