2023-05-14 06:00:23
Contemplating and appreciating the beauty of cherry blossoms (“sakura”), a ritual called ” Hanami “ in Japan, is only possible in the spring, for a precious period of three weeks, between March and May depending on the region of the Archipelago. This hanami is now arousing a craze far beyond Japan. In the United States, where Japanese cherry trees have taken root since 1912, sakura festivals are attracting a growing audience. The phenomenon is also a marker of climate change. “My mom asked me, ‘When do the cherry trees bloom in Japan?’ So I found 1,200 years of data on the internet to create a graph for him”, recently told Robin Rohwer on Twitter, from Austin, in the south of the United States. The post-doctoral researcher studies microbial ecology and evolution at the University of Texas.
Mom asked, “I wonder when cherries bloom in Japan?” So I found 1200 years of data online and made her a plot. https://t.co/89ln6oftMh
On a background of Mount Fuji painted in Indian ink, flowers in emoji are inlaid, symbolizing the dates of flowering of the cherry trees. Although perfectible – the curve supposed to represent the evolution of plants does not seem precise enough – this data visualization has been seen millions of times and shared by thousands of people, including climatologists, and reproduced with precisions and updates. .
The data behind these visualizations was made available by researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University, who have long studied the evolution of the seasonal development of the Prunus jamasakura (or Yamazakura in Japanese), an ancient species of Japanese cherry tree whose full bloom lasts only two to four days a year. Scientists are finding that these plants bloom earlier and earlier. “This year, their flowering peaked on March 25”, reports Yasuyuki Aono, associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University. According to his research, this is the earliest date ever recorded for… one thousand two hundred years.
Reconstructing the climate of the past
Although Japanese weather stations have only begun to observe the phenology (the science of plant cycles) that for a century, Yasuyuki Aono and Keiko Kazui, authors of a article important on the study of climate and cherry trees, managed to build a set of corpuses from the year 812, by compiling observation and study data, and by collecting information from ancient archives.
“The object of our investigation was the personal diaries (…) emperors, nobles, warriors, priests, merchants, doctors, painters and ordinary citizens living in Kyoto”, says Mr. Aono. Indeed, in ancient times, the Japanese kept diaries to record their daily events such as the weather, astronomy or the programs of traditional ceremonies. “We extracted the dates when there were recordings of cherry branches offered to absentees at parties, of poems [tanka] composed on the theme, but especially those of cherry blossoms in full bloom and feasts of contemplation”he says.
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