Climate change poses many complex challenges at local scales. Phenology, the reoccurring patterns ofplants flowering, birds migrating, and many other ecological events responds to changing climates. Phenological observations have been collected for centuries, providing insight into the relative timing of events and how that timing shifts from year to year. Indigenous cultures have applied their own observations to decision making for even longer through ecological calendars represented in both written and oral traditions. Ecological calendars relate the timing of biophysical and phenological events to seasonal changes and the practices of ecological professionals (e.g., farmers, hunters, trappers, anglers, and more). Learning from these long-standing practices, we consider that ecological calendars may have value in building adaptive capacity among rural communities in the face of climate change. Here we collaborated with ecological professionals living in and around the Oneida Lake Watershed, located in upstate New York. Initial workshops were held with participants in 2016 to generate seasonal rounds. Follow up interviews were conducted with individuals identified using a snowball method. A follow up validation workshop was held in 2018 to verify the interpretation of interview data with the community. Finally, an ecological calendar was generated using interview data combined with and other records from scholarly publications, herbaria, and citizen science projects. We find that ecological professionals living in and around the Oneida Lake Watershed carry a wide array of knowledge that can be applied to the development of an ecological calendar. These calendars may be useful both as a framework for connecting knowledge systems and tool for informing decision making.