Observing Spring and Fall Phenology in a Deciduous Forest with Aerial Drone Imagery.

ABSTRACT: Plant phenology is a sensitive indicator of the effects of global change on terrestrial ecosystems and controls the timing of key ecosystem functions including photosynthesis and transpiration. Aerial drone imagery and photogrammetric techniques promise to advance the study of phenology by enabling the creation of distortion-free orthomosaics of plant canopies at the landscape scale, but with branch-level image resolution. The main goal of this study is to determine the leaf life cycle events corresponding to phenological metrics derived from automated analyses based on color indices calculated from drone imagery. For an oak-dominated, temperate deciduous forest in the northeastern USA, we find that plant area index (PAI) correlates with a canopy greenness index during spring green-up, and

SUBMITTER: Klosterman S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5751649 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature