She does more than stop and smell the flowers

Geetha Ramaswami leads the SeasonWatch programme, which uses the power of citizen science to understand how trees respond to changing seasons

By Bharti Dharapuram

| Posted on March 6, 2025

“There is something very magical about these organisms that are rooted to one spot and have managed to change the history of the world several times over,” gushes Dr Geetha Ramaswami.

Ramaswami is a plant ecologist who was smitten by the natural world as a child. Letting her curiosity take the lead, she studied how a notorious invasive plant spreads in the ecosystem for her PhD. Ramaswami now leads the SeasonWatch programme, which uses the power of citizen science to understand how trees respond to changing seasons. It gives ordinary people the joy of connecting with nature while collecting data that can tell us how climate change influences the life cycle of plants.

Ramaswami fell in love with nature over childhood summer vacations spent in a very green Kerala, far away from the urbanness of her home in Delhi. “I got to experience a very ecologically diverse place and wanted to experience natural spaces for more than just the summer vacation,” she recollects. “We have a house in Palakkad district–known as Kerala’s granary–and we used to enjoy our stay there very much,” says KS Ramaswami, Geetha’s father, about their yearly summer sojourns. “We were in the lap of nature and I feel that it greatly influenced her.”

Geetha Ramaswami during her PhD fiedwork

Convinced that her path lay outside the traditional routes of engineering and medicine, she did her bachelor’s in botany from Sri Venkateswara College at Delhi University, immensely enjoying field visits where she observed rare and unique plants in their natural habitat. However, it was a master’s degree in environmental biology at the University of Delhi that sealed the deal for her to pursue ecology for life.

“Geetha is totally independent and decided about her future herself. We never interfered with her studies and she has come up on her own. She is a self-made person,” says Geetha’s father.

“One of my earliest inspirations for pursuing a career in ecology was my teachers during my master’s, especially the one who taught us ecological processes and another who taught us animal behaviour,” Ramaswami says. “I was immediately converted.”

The master’s course also introduced her to invasive plants, which become widespread when introduced into a new region and harm the native ecosystem. During her PhD at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and her postdoctoral research, she studied Lantana camara, a South American plant, which turned rogue after being introduced into our gardens two centuries ago.

“Where there is lantana, we are invariably going to find reduced plant diversity. It creates a lot of changes in the ecosystem that it invades,” Ramaswami says. Her research finds that forest fire and low moisture can help lantana expand in forests, and birds feeding on its fruit disperse seeds right back into areas from where its stubborn thickets are cleared. Dealing with this hydra-headed plant can benefit from a fresh perspective – “an ecological framework to decide when somebody can stop managing and adapt to its presence,” she says. During PhD, her mentors and labmates were terrific influences, Ramaswami adds. “They really taught me what fieldwork is all about.”

“Geetha is the first PhD in our family. We are happy with the path she has chosen and I am very proud of her,” says Mr. Ramaswami.

When Ramaswami was buried in lantana research during her PhD, an opportunity to volunteer for SeasonWatch caught her attention. SeasonWatch started in 2010 as a citizen science project to monitor plant phenology, which is the appearance of flowers, fruits and new leaves on trees in response to environmental cues.

Mango fruiting in Kerala in 2017 under different rainfall and elevation conditions

“We started SeasonWatch with two broad objectives, one was to generate information on seasonality of trees across a geographic gradient and over time. The second was the education objective, which for us was to get kids outdoors, to interact with and become close to nature,” says Dr Suhel Quader, who started SeasonWatch, and is a Scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation, Bangalore heading their Education and Public Engagement programme.

The idea is to track seasonal milestones of common Indian trees over many years to capture the effects of climate change. Anyone can observe trees near them and submit their observations through the SeasonWatch mobile app or website. Ramaswami was among the earliest people to contribute observations to the project, and in 2018, she officially became an integral part of the team as a programme manager. Today, she is the team lead of SeasonWatch, and the programme has logged more than eight lakh observations documenting several thousands of trees and has close to 3000 schools under its fold.

Most SeasonWatch contributors are schoolchildren who are reached through regional partners trained by the programme. A shining example is SeasonWatch’s partnership with SEED in Kerala, a school-based environmental awareness arm of the publication house Mathrubhumi.

“Students have started observing trees on campus, in their home gardens and also while traveling to school and back,” says Muhammed Nizar, who has been leading SeasonWatch’s Kerala programme for many years. Students also started noticing long-term patterns, like a school in Thrissur that went on to test how watering can influence flowering patterns in Cassia fistula trees. This curiosity about trees has spilled over to birds, caterpillars, moths and butterflies found on them, says Nizar.

Group photo of school teachers who attended a SeasonWatch workshop in 2020

School children observing trees near a golden shower tree in bloom

“A sense of wonder and excitement has changed fear and disgust for creepy-crawlies into curiosity,” adds Ramaswami.

With ten years of data behind them, the time is ripe to look at large-scale patterns in plant phenology. “We can actually start looking at correlations with environment. From the initial analysis, we know that the onset of flowering can be affected by a combination of factors such as temperature, soil moisture, solar radiation and even urbanisation,” Ramaswami explains.

“With Geetha coming on board and bringing a real research focus to it, I think there’s been more action on the science side of things,” says Quader.

“We are building a quantitative baseline for the phenology of trees and their seasonality,” Ramaswami says. “We want to take this data places.” There are phenological datasets from temperate regions going back over a century. But the trends observed there may not be representative of tropical regions like India, which lacks such historical data. Developing good baseline data is important for research in detecting future changes in tree phenology and the underlying factors driving it.

Documenting changes in phenology over the last decade and finding intuitive and interactive ways of communicating it to citizen scientists is a major goal.“Imagine being able to open the SeasonWatch app, looking at your tree, and maybe predicting what it will do over the next one month,” she says animatedly, “These are all big pipe dreams.”

Managing a multifaceted programme also comes with its challenges. “By communicating selectively in a few languages, we may be excluding people who have a lot of knowledge and interest,” Ramaswami says. “We are excluding a large majority of people by making this project very technology-focused. Technically, even literacy should not be a barrier for reporting seasonal patterns of trees,” she reflects. Another challenge has been communicating data back to the audience effectively. Data is not as intuitive as experiences are, Ramaswami says. “To give back that immediate gratification that many people feel from using technology is very difficult.”

“One of the things that strikes me about the SeasonWatch team is that it is very non-hierarchical. Decisions are made by consensus and the process is much more deliberative. Geetha somehow manages so that everyone gets along, and supports and complements each other,” says Quader. Also, the team isn’t based in the same location, everybody works remotely. That is an extremely difficult situation to deal with, but she and her team have managed it wonderfully,” he adds.

The future holds exciting times for Ramaswami and her team. Looking at its impact on children’s attitudes towards nature, they are finding ways to integrate SeasonWatch into school curricula. This was supported by their survey of teachers, which showed that students are familiar with climate change but do not associate it with their local environment, says Dr Suhirtha Muhil, a nature educator at SeasonWatch. Collaborating with teachers, she recently designed a resource book that uses nature observation activities to discuss climate change with children. “That is the most thrilling development.”

It is nice to have a team leader who has a keen eye for ecological research while truly appreciating education and outreach, says Muhil.

“I am very excited about a programme we started last year called Campus Phenology Network headed by my colleague Swati Sidhu,” Ramaswami says. This ‘murmuration’ of college students monitoring campus trees has taken a life of its own over time. There is also the India Treewalks Network coordinated by SeasonWatchs’s Saiee Giridhari, who also lovingly curates tree stories from people. The network brings together people who want to bring other people closer to trees.

Ramaswami’s fulfilment from her work comes to the fore when she meets teachers during SeasonWatch workshops. “They are adults who have retained child-like curiosity and are very open-minded,” she says. “To be able to provide a space where people can express themselves and say how they connect to nature and how they want children to connect to nature is something very valuable.”

About the author

Bharti is an ecologist with a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where she studied how ocean currents and environment shape coastal biodiversity. Following this, she studied arthropod diversity in the forests of the Western Ghats for her postdoctoral research at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. She has been drawn to language and writing since childhood, which led her to the annual Science Journalism course offered by the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. During the challenging phases of her PhD research, she found solace and fulfilment in writing about scientific discoveries and the people behind them.