Plant seasons captured by ground cameras (2000-2023)
What it measures. The timing of the seasons for plants, when leaves green up in spring and fade in autumn, tracked through color (greenness) extracted from everyday camera photos at 738 sites, mostly in North America, from 2000 to 2023.
How it's made. Built from frequent automated digital camera images at each site; the red, green and blue color channels are summarized over chosen patches of vegetation into daily and 3-day trends.
How & where you'd use it. Used to study how plant seasons shift with climate, to check satellite vegetation products, and to improve Earth system models.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span1999-12-31 → 2023-12-31
- Measured byFIELD SURVEYS (CAMERAS)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- Spatial extent-158.171, -45.0386, 172.351, 71.283
- Formatsmultiple
- StatusCOMPLETE
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
This dataset provides vegetation phenological observations for 738 sites across diverse ecosystems of the world (mostly North America) from 2000 to 2023. The phenology data were derived from conventional visible-wavelength automated digital camera imagery collected through the PhenoCam Network at each site. From each acquired image, RGB (red, green, blue) color channel information was extracted and summary statistics were calculated for a region-of-interest (ROI) that delineates an area of specific vegetation type. From the high-frequency (typically, 30 minute) imagery collected over several years, time series characterizing vegetation color, including canopy greenness, plus greenness rising and greenness falling transition dates, were summarized over 1- and 3-day intervals. These data products, consisting of 4805.5 site-years of observations, can be used for phenological modeling, to evaluate satellite remote sensing data products, to understand relationships between canopy phenology and ecosystem processes, to study the seasonal changes in leaf-level physiology that are associated with changes in leaf color, for benchmarking earth system models, and for studies of climate change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. The data are provided in comma separated values (CSV), TIFF image, text, JSON, and GeoJSON formats.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="PhenoCam_V3_2389",
version="3",
bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"), # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results) # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.