I started the Alberta Wildflower Survey started in 1987, engaging volunteer observers in reporting bloom dates of 15 native plant species (Beaubien 1991). See a brief history of the program and archived data on the (old) Alberta Plantwatch webpage at http://plantwatch.sunsite.ualberta.ca/background.php (Note: this webpage is soon to be replaced by an updated interactive site at http://www.fanweb.ca/).
This program was renamed Alberta Plantwatch in 2002, and now has received data from over 950 observers (up to 200 annually). This is arguably the most comprehensive regional data set (most observations, longest duration) for recent decades for North America (Bradley et al. 1999, Schwartz and Reiter 2000, Linderholm 2006).
Subsets of the data have been analysed in a variety of ways. First, an initial summarization of data on 15 plant species 1987-1992 was correlated with temperature measurements (Beaubien and Johnson 1994). A spring flowering index combining data for woody species for the Edmonton area was correlated with El Niño events and Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures (Beaubien and Freeland, 2000 (http://plantwatch.sunsite.ualberta.ca/downloads/phenpaper.pdf). As well, selected data was correlated with the satellite vegetation index NDVI (Beaubien and Hall-Beyer 2003).