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For parts of the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, the experimental peakweek project estimates whether eight tree species are likely to be green, showing fall color, or bare on each of the next 15 days. Its weekend card can help you choose when and where to look, but it is a species-level probability forecast—not a guarantee for a particular tree or a measure of how much of a whole canopy has changed.
What the forecast can tell you
The project’s practical question is whether a tree of a represented species, photographed nearby on a given day, is likely to have green, colored, or absent leaves. It produces daily predictions across a 15-day horizon and a printable summary card for the coming weekend.
Coverage is limited to eight species and a bounding area described as the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic: latitude 38.5–47.5 and longitude −80.5 to −66.9. The listed species are red maple, sugar maple, sweetgum, northern red oak, American beech, black gum, sassafras, and Norway maple. A location inside those coordinates does not mean every local tree is represented; other species and areas outside the bounds are not covered by this forecast.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Interpret its output as the chance of a status for a tree encountered, not the percentage of a park, hillside, or canopy that has changed color. Individual trees can differ with site conditions, exposure, health, and local weather.
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How peakweek builds its estimates
In a project description published October 6, 2026, author Bowen Rui reports querying September–November iNaturalist observations from 2018 through 2025. The API returned 10,877 observations; after exclusions, 6,650 remained. The author reports 3,457 green labels, 2,846 colored labels, and 347 bare labels. These are project-reported totals, not an independently audited or necessarily representative sample of all trees in the region. See the peakweek project description.
The reported exclusions removed cultivated trees, casual-grade observations, records with obscured or insufficiently precise coordinates, conflicting or unusable leaf annotations, and records without open licenses. Even after filtering, observation coverage can be uneven by place, species, and date, so the total count by itself does not establish uniform local reliability.
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The model combines species and location information with day of year, elevation, and day length. Weather inputs include accumulated chilling degree days since September 1, frost and cold-night counts, recent minimum and mean temperatures, 30-day rainfall, and a comparison of current fall temperatures with other falls at the same place. The project says historical weather and current weather-to-date come from the same ERA5 archive; forecast weather supplies inputs for today and the following 14 days.
What the reported evaluation says—and does not say
The author says model settings were selected using 2024 validation data, then evaluated once against held-out 2025 observations. The reported 2025 comparison is:
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- Pocket Guide to Trees and Shrubs of North America
- Pocket Guide to Trees and Shrubs of North America
- National Geographic Maps
| Model or reference | Accuracy | Log loss | Brier score |
|---|---|---|---|
| TabPFN v2 with all features | 0.805 | 0.498 | 0.285 |
| Gradient-boosted trees | 0.802 | 0.505 | 0.291 |
| Climatology | 0.752 | 0.581 | 0.345 |
These figures are author-reported results for the stated held-out 2025 evaluation, not a guarantee of performance in another year or at a particular location. The author reports a 0.021 log-loss improvement over the preselected baseline for TabPFN; gradient-boosted trees were close and not significantly different. Weather features improved on a calendar-only TabPFN configuration by 0.018 log loss in that 2025 test. The reported advantage is chiefly in probability quality rather than top-class accuracy.
Results also varied by species: TabPFN led for red maple, sugar maple, and American beech, while simpler models did better for northern red oak, black gum, sweetgum, and sassafras. That variation is a reason to treat the forecast as useful guidance rather than a uniform measure of confidence across every listed tree.
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The 2026 check is still small
For the live 2026 pipeline, the author reports 99 filtered annotated observations dated September 26 to October 5: 77 green and 22 colored. Reported log loss was 0.454 for TabPFN and 0.436 for logistic regression. The author cautions that this sample is too small to rank the models confidently; it does not establish current-season accuracy.
How this fits into plant-forecasting research
Fall-color prediction is not a new research area. A 2020 Ecological Applications paper describes a U.S. automated forecasting system for 78 species and multiple phenophases—including budburst, flowers, ripe fruit, and fall colors—with forecasts up to six months ahead and updates every four days. Its broader scope and longer horizon provide context, not a head-to-head performance comparison with peakweek. Read the 2020 study.
Best Value
Long-term observations also caution against treating weather as a single universal switch. A Harvard Forest study based on 1993–2010 observations of eight species associated autumn-color timing and amount with temperature and precipitation at particular times of year, with responses differing by species and phenophase. In that analysis, warmer autumn temperatures were associated with later full display and leaf fall in red maple. These findings do not justify a blanket claim that warmer weather always advances or delays fall color everywhere. Read the Harvard Forest study.
Quick Recap
Using the weekend card sensibly
- Check that your location falls within the stated Northeast and Mid-Atlantic bounds.
- Look for a species-specific estimate rather than assuming the forecast applies to every tree nearby.
- Use the day-by-day probabilities to compare possible outing dates, not as a promise that a particular tree will be at peak color.
- Identify the tree before relying on its estimate; an Eastern tree identification field guide can help distinguish the eight covered species.
- Expect conditions to vary within a location and remember that the forecast is about a tree’s green, colored, or bare status, not the share of a landscape in peak color.
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