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Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2013

• Title: The Effects of Differing Tracking Methods for Vegetative Phenology
• Author: Dmitri Ilushin (Harvard College (Harvard University))
• Abstract:

  Vegetation phenology, annual life cycles of plants, provides a key feedback with climate variability and change and is an important parameter in land surface models used to predict global climate. As such, there is a need to track the rhythm of the seasons with more detail. Common remote sensing methods used to track phenology are limited by their coarse temporal and/or spatial resolutions. Alternatively, I look to explore the usability of publicly available “webcams” in their use as an indicator of phenological trends. More specifically, I address the question of how this new measurement relates to that of satellite imagery, a standard technique for remote sensing of phenology. I have used a subset of images from publicly available webcams from the Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes as my test data. From the 685 cameras used, I extracted the phenological transition dates calculated for both spring and fall using multiple differing methods and compared these values to corresponding dates extracted from satellite imagery. With this information, I will first determine the relationship of differing date extraction methods on the webcams to find out their utility as well as compare how the two techniques of phenological study compare with each other to find whether or not there is a bias in one measurement versus another. This information will help better our understanding of how growth patterns are affecting net uptake of carbon and how trees and forests respond to changing climate.

• Research Category: Ecological Informatics and Modelling; Regional Studies


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