Introducing digital cameras to monitor plant phenology in the tropics: applications for conservation

Alberton, Bruna; Torres, Ricardo da Silva; Cancian, Leonardo Farage; Borges, Bernardo Melo Montes Nogueira; Almeida, Jurandy; Mariano, Greice Cristina; Santos, Jefersson dos; Morellato, Leonor Patrícia Cerdeira

doi:10.1016/j.pecon.2017.06.004

Cited by 65 publications

(70 citation statements)

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“…We illustrate the use of RadialPheno to visualize the greenness index extracted from sequential imagery of Cerrado vegetation located in southeastern Brazil (Alberton et al., ). The process of digital image analysis depends on the definition of regions of interest (ROI), representing a region within the sample image defined for analysis (see Richardson et al., ; Alberton et al., , ). An ROI represents an individual tree crown (our study case), populations, or a community or vegetation type within the landscape (Richardson et al., ; Alberton et al., ).…”

Section: Methods and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The process of digital image analysis depends on the definition of regions of interest (ROI), representing a region within the sample image defined for analysis (see Richardson et al., ; Alberton et al., , ). An ROI represents an individual tree crown (our study case), populations, or a community or vegetation type within the landscape (Richardson et al., ; Alberton et al., ). From each ROI, we extract vegetation indices from red, green, and blue (RGB) color channels of the digital images (Richardson et al., ; Sonnentag et al., ; Filippa et al., ).…”

Section: Methods and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typical methodologies rely on the direct observation of plants on the ground (Morellato et al., ). This approach, however, is a time‐consuming and error‐prone task, mainly due to the need of observing hundreds of individual plants for long periods of time (Morellato et al., ; Alberton et al., ). A suitable alternative relies on the use of remote monitoring techniques based on the use of sequential images taken by near‐surface digital cameras (Richardson et al., , ; Alberton et al., , ).…”

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confidence: 99%

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RadialPheno: A tool for near‐surface phenology analysis through radial layouts

et al. 2019

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Premise Increasingly, researchers studying plant phenology are exploring novel technologies to remotely observe plant changes over time. The increasing use of phenocams to monitor leaf phenology, based on the analysis of indices extracted from sequences of daily digital vegetation images, has demanded the development of appropriate tools for data visualization and analysis. Here, we describe RadialPheno, a tool that uses radial layouts to represent time series from digital repeat photographs, and applies them to the analysis of leafing patterns and leaf exchange strategies of different vegetations. Methods and Results We developed a web tool, RadialPheno, provided with the R and Shiny environments, which uses radial visual structures to represent cyclical multidimensional temporal data associated with digital image time series. We demonstrate the application of our methods and tool for a savanna vegetation phenology in the Brazilian Cerrado. We visually represented the greenness index extracted from sequential imagery using the RadialPheno tool. Conclusions RadialPheno was successfully applied for the visualization and interpretation of individual, species, and community long‐term leafing phenology data associated with near‐surface phenological observations of Cerrado vegetation. RadialPheno was also effective for intercomparisons of ground‐based direct visual observations and camera‐derived phenology observations.

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Section: Methods and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methods and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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RadialPheno: A tool for near‐surface phenology analysis through radial layouts

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“…They enable us to monitor more sites, more remote places, larger areas, and to improve standardization between sites (Alberton et al . , Richardson et al . ).…”

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“…The early scholarly record in the tropics contains many anecdotal or non‐systematic studies, and, contrary to today, least information on leaf phenology, perhaps because it is not an easily observed cyclical phenophase in semi‐evergreen or evergreen forests (Alberton et al . ) or is of less importance to large wildlife, the foci of early studies.…”

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Current issues in tropical phenology: a synthesis

et al. 2018

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We retrace the development of tropical phenology research, compare temperate phenology study to that in the tropics and highlight the advances currently being made in this flourishing discipline. The synthesis draws attention to how fundamentally different tropical phenology data can be to temperate data. Tropical plants lack a phase of winter dormancy and may grow and reproduce continually. Seasonal patterns in environmental parameters, such as rainfall, irradiance or temperature, do not necessarily coincide temporally, as they do in temperate climes. We review recent research on the drivers of phenophase cycles in individual trees, species and communities and highlight how significant innovations in biometric tools and approaches are being driven by the need to deal with circular data, the complexity of defining tropical seasons and the myriad growth and reproductive strategies used by tropical plants. We discuss how important the use of leaf phenology (or remotely‐sensed proxies of leaf phenophases) has become in tracking biome responses to climate change at the continental level and how important the phenophase of forests can be in determining local weather conditions. We also highlight how powerful analyses of plant responses are hampered at many tropical sites by a lack of contextual data on local environmental conditions. We conclude by arguing that there is a clear global benefit in increasing long term tropical phenology data collection and improving empirical collection of local climate measures, contemporary to the phenology data. Directing more resources to research in this sector will be widely beneficial.

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