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Frans-Jan Parmentier

Frans-Jan Parmentier

Associate professor

Frans-Jan Parmentier

A distributed time-lapse camera network to track vegetation phenology with high temporal detail and at varying scales

Author

  • Frans Jan W. Parmentier
  • Lennart Nilsen
  • Hans Tømmervik
  • Elisabeth J. Cooper

Summary, in English

Near-surface remote sensing techniques are essential monitoring tools to provide spatial and temporal resolutions beyond the capabilities of orbital methods. This high level of detail is especially helpful to monitor specific plant communities and to accurately time the phenological stages of vegetation - which satellites can miss by days or weeks in frequently clouded areas such as the Arctic. In this paper, we describe a measurement network that is distributed across varying plant communities in the high Arctic valley of Adventdalen on the Svalbard archipelago with the aim of monitoring vegetation phenology. The network consists of 10 racks equipped with sensors that measure NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index), soil temperature, and moisture as well as time-lapse RGB cameras (i.e. phenocams). Three additional time-lapse cameras are placed on nearby mountains to provide an overview of the valley. We derived the vegetation index GCC (green chromatic channel) from these RGB photos, which has similar applications as NDVI but at a fraction of the cost of NDVI imaging sensors. To create a robust time series for GCC, each set of photos was adjusted for unwanted movement of the camera with a stabilizing algorithm that enhances the spatial precision of these measurements. This code is available at 10.5281/zenodo.4554937 (Parmentier, 2021) and can be applied to time series obtained with other time-lapse cameras. This paper presents an overview of the data collection and processing and an overview of the dataset that is available at 10.21343/kbpq-xb91 (Nilsen et al., 2021). In addition, we provide some examples of how these data can be used to monitor different vegetation communities in the landscape.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system

Publishing year

2021

Language

English

Pages

3593-3606

Publication/Series

Earth System Science Data

Volume

13

Issue

7

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Copernicus GmbH

Topic

  • Physical Geography

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1866-3508