You are here
Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2013
- Title: Using remote sensing and the Urban Heat Island to understand the effects that global warming has on the phenology of vegetation
- Author: Guillermo A Terrazas (The University of Texas at Austin)
- Abstract:
Guillermo Terrazas
The University of Texas at Austin
Mentors: Josh Gray, Eli Melaas, Mark Friedl
Using remote sensing and the Urban Heat Island to understand the effects that global warming has on the phenology of vegetation
Climate change has altered the rhythm of the seasons. The study of these vegetative seasonal cycles is called phenology. For plants close to urban areas, the timing of both spring onset and autumn senescence is noticeably different than the surrounding rural region. This anomaly occurs because human development increases impervious surface areas, which reradiate infrared waves and increase the air temperature in what is known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI). The UHI presents the perfect proxy in order to investigate how the phenology of rural areas will behave in the future given the predicted rise in global temperatures. Understanding these effects is crucial, because even slight changes in the vegetative growing season has a significant impact in the atmosphere’s carbon budget, water usage, and even the structure of entire ecosystems. In order to research the phenology of such large areas, we derive processed data transmitted by the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. This data contains information such as onset/senescence dates, land surface temperature, and land cover type. Although the data is provided for any place on Earth, we focus our research on the New England region. Computer algorithms are created in order to retrieve patterns between the phenology, temperature, and distance data. Results have confirmed the effect of the UHI on phenology, namely earlier start of season dates and later end of season dates, and therefore longer growing seasons. Although there is a correlation between distance from the urban center and phenology change, the main driving factor behind the change in phenology is temperature. - Research Category: Ecological Informatics and Modelling; Group Projects
- Figures: me.png
