Monitoring of cherry flowering phenology with Google Trends

PLoS One. 2022 Jul 21;17(7):e0271648. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271648. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Google Trends (GT) is an online tool designed for searching for changes over time. We assessed its use for evaluating changes in the timing of cherry flowering phenology, which is of intense interest to Japanese people. We examined the relationship between time-series of relative search volume (RSV: relative change in search requests over time obtained from the GT access engine) and cherry flowering information published on websites (as ground truth) in relation to three famous ancient cherry trees. The time-series of RSV showed an annual bell-shaped seasonal variability, and the dates of the maximum RSV tended to correspond to the dates of full bloom. Our results suggest that GT allows monitoring of multiple famous cherry flowering sites where we cannot obtain long-term flowering data to evaluate the spatiotemporal variability of cherry flowering phenology.

MeSH terms

  • Flowers*
  • Humans
  • Search Engine*
  • Seasons
  • Trees

Grants and funding

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.