What is Chasing Spring?

Chasing Spring is a documentary project examining the British relationship with spring. It grew out of an interest in seasonal food, a bite from the bicycle bug and a desire to answer the tantalising question: 'Could you travel at the speed of spring?'.

Izzy Kaminski and Matt Newington are undertaking a two-month cycling journey from Land's End to John o'Groats tracking spring as it moves up the country. Along the way they will interview a variety of people about their professional and personal relationships with spring to find out how the changing seasons affect their lives.

Our team will be recording every mile of the journey with blogs and a video diary, photos and social network updates. They will also be filming their progress using a digital video camera, which will be edited into a feature-length documentary once the journey is over.

When does it start?

Chasing Spring is working with Nature's Calendar, part of the Woodland Trust, which collects sightings of animals and plants from the general public (see sponsors and supporters for more information).

Our two cyclists will not begin their journey until Nature's Calendar receives sightings of particular species of animals and plants in the south-west region. Once these have been spotted our team will make its way to Land's End and will begin the journey northwards.

How do you know when spring starts?

There is no definitive way of telling when spring has sprung because countries, cultures, organisations and researchers use different markers to define the beginning and end of particular seasons.

Meteorologists, for example, mark out the seasons in different parts of the world in three-month slots depending on average temperatures. In the UK, March, April and May are generally accepted as springtime months. On the other hand, diary-writers tend to announce 21 March as the official start of spring regardless of what's going on outside.

For phenologists (people who study how climate affects specific events in the life-cycles of plants and animals) spring is often signalled by 'indicators' such as the amount of green vegetation, the blossoming of particular plants or the birthing seasons of particular animals. This was the approach we wanted to go for with Chasing Spring.

Working with Nature's Calendar (see Sponsors and Supporters) we had a variety of animal and plant species to choose from. In the end we chose hawthorn (first leaf), frog tadpoles and sand martins for a number of reasons. Firstly, although we wanted to start our journey as close to the start of spring as possible, we had to consider when we were practically able to begin. Secondly, we wanted species that we could find and film along the journey, hopefully spotting them fairly regularly as we followed the season northwards.

We also wanted to minimise the problem of outliers, a first sighting of an animal or plant that occurs far outside the average time period or much further north than first sightings normally appear. This is why we chose more than one species as our signal.

We also worked with Dr Sietse Los of Swansea University (see Background) who examined the start of the growing season – one way of defining the start of spring – in various parts of south-west England. Near Land's End, this date in 2009 and 2010 came during the first few days of March, while in 2008 it was nearly two weeks earlier.

What is the speed of spring?

By averaging the spread of first sightings of springtime animals and plants, it can be seen that spring takes about two months to move from the south to the north of the country.

By road, the Land's End to John o'Groats journey is approximately 850 miles which, with our planned diversions, takes us to about 1000 miles in total. Over the two months, our team needs to cover on average 17 miles a day – some days this will be longer and some shorter, depending on the local flora and fauna, interviewees and where they can practically arrange to stay the night.

It's important to note that this is not a perfect science. There are many factors affecting phenological changes and influencing how they are measured. For the Chasing Spring team, the idea of waiting for particular species to appear is a useful and engaging way of starting our journey and making ourselves reliant on the seasons.

We have put our project in the hands of enthusiastic volunteers across the country and have given ourselves a structure in which to examine how communities in the UK (including us travellers) are affected by the seasons and to show how they can both benefit and hinder modern life.