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Every October, when I was growing up in Massachusetts, my parents would check out the fall foliage reports and determine where we were going to drive to see the colorful leaves. And they still do. In New England, leaf peeping, as it’s called, is a billion dollar industry and millions of people travel to the region during foliage season.

In Maine’s Acadia National Park, visitation has more than doubled in September and October since the early 1990s. Tourists book leaf peeping cruises, bus trips and lodging packages, all scheduled to coincide with what’s traditionally been the somewhat predictable fall foliage season.

But Earth’s climate is changing. A big question is how climate change’s impacts on the timing, duration and vibrancy of fall foliage will affect the tourist season.

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Maybe you have the selfies we seek

This lack of data is why we need citizen scientists to help us fill in the gaps.

With apps and programs like Nature’s Notebook, iNaturalist, BudBurst and eBird, it’s never been easier for anyone to share their observations of the world around them. Scientists have recently been trawling social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and Instagram for data to estimate park visitation rates, map monarch butterfly and snowy owl sightings and understand the various ways people value different landscapes.

Collecting photos from people who’ve traveled to Acadia is helping us validate the satellite data we do have. My team is able to make sure what we see in the satellite images actually represents of what is happening on the ground in the park. We are so appreciative of all the photos we’ve received from people who have visited Acadia this year. And we have received a bunch, 907 to be exact, of submitted photos from the post-cellphone camera era.

That doesn’t get us back to before the advent of continuous satellite data, though. We need leaf peepers to dig deeper into their personal photo albums to help us figure out the timing of fall foliage before the year 2000.

Those earlier photos – from a time of yore when you actually had to remove film from a camera and take it to get developed – are proving much harder to come by. So far we have two data points from before 2010, one from 1987 and one from 1981.

We’re asking for your help. We know those awkward family photos of you or your parents in their 1970s bell bottoms standing in front of Acadia’s Jordan Pond exist. And we want them. If you have any old vacation photos taken in the park during the fall, scan them and send them our way.

Understanding the relationships between climate change, fall foliage and park visitorship have important implications for park management, the local economies of towns on and around Mount Desert Island, and those of us who love visiting Acadia in the fall. So leaf peep – for science.