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The National Science Foundation has recently funded two projects exploring emerging technologies and potential applications to PhenoCam-type monitoring. Andrew is a Co-PI on both grants.

Led by PI V.P. Nguyen at UMass-Amherst, the project “Repurposing Batteryless SmartPhones as Long-lived and Adaptable Sensors for Sustainable and Scalable Environmental Monitoring” aims to turn old smartphones into sustainable alternatives to conventional Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, creating a long-lived platform for environmental monitoring. The project develops biocompatible, energy-harvesting phone cases, enabling legacy smartphones to operate without batteries or manual maintenance. In collaboration with Co-PI Troy Gilmore (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), the NAU team will conduct field testing in different geographic regions, with the specific goal of evaluating these repurposed smartphones as environmental sensors for hydrological and phenological monitoring.

The project, “Cyberinfrastructure and community to leverage ground-based imagery in ecohydrological studies,” which is also in collaboration with PI Troy Gilmore’s group at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, develops AI-based cyberinfrastructure (the “GRIME-AI” platform) to extract scientifically useful data from digital imagery collected by both individual trail cams and extensive monitoring networks such as PhenoCam. An overarching goal of the project is to lower the barriers to image processing and data extraction, allowing people with different levels of technical expertise and backgrounds to advance science using digital repeat photography. The NAU team is currently working on getting the GRIME-AI software running on the Monsoon HPC. Jacob plans to use GRIME-AI to facilitate the extraction of phenological data from the 72 cameras at the SEV MVE experiment.

Here’s a news update from Alison Post, who was a postdoc in the lab from 2021-2023 and is now Program Manager for the Earth Lab at CU Boulder:

“I had a great time at ESA last week presenting a workshop on PhenoCam. The workshop was titled Using GitHub Codespaces to Access and Visualize PhenoCam Data in the Classroom. We developed an interactive lesson for students to start playing with PhenoCam data in R using a simple web-based coding interface. This method allows students to skip the often frustrating step of downloading R and all the necessary packages before starting to code.

It was well-attended, and participants enjoyed learning about PhenoCam (as always!). The code I developed allows you to enter any site and graph GCC [green chromatic coordinate], changes in SOS [start of season] and EOS [end of season] through time, and make a nice layout and video gif of a year of imagery. We also developed a digital textbook page with an associated instruction video for the lesson.” 

Congratulations Alison, and thanks for letting us know about these fantastic resources!

Andrew and Mostafa have assembled a bibliography of published papers that include or analyze PhenoCam data and imagery, or otherwise leverage resources developed by or in collaboration with the PhenoCam team. The motivation for assembling this resource was to make it easier for current and future PhenoCam users to identify relevant literature, and to document the impact that PhenoCam has had over the last 17 years.

The bibliography currently includes almost 480 items, and is available on Figshare in several formats (RIS, BibTex, Zotero RDF, and EndNote XML). There is also an accompanying Gemini-based publication visualization tool developed by Mostafa.

Fun facts: The bibliography includes over 70 papers from in 2021 alone, and a remarkable 60 theses (undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral) to date.

Updates to the bibliography will be posted on a regular basis, and community members are encouraged to send updates and corrections to Andrew.Richardson@NAU.edu.

In early August, Yujie traveled to San Francisco to participate in the FLUXNET workshop Bridging the Gap: Flux Data Meets Land Surface Models. Yujie was one of the main organizers of the workshop, serving as the Fluxnet Early Career representative on the workshop’s planning committee, and she led two tutorials on flux data processing and applications; the tutorials are publicly available on GitHub. Yujie noted that the workshop “had been a great opportunity to learn some basics of land surface modeling!”

Planning committee, from L to R: Md (Mo) Shamsuzzaman (South East Technological University, Ireland), Roel Ruzol (Howland Research Forest, University of Maine), Brian Wang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Bailey Murphy (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Kunxiaojia (Tammy) Yuan (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Yujie Liu (Northern Arizona University), Karem Meza Capcha (University of California Davis), Theresia Yazbeck (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry).

What’s a workshop without the obligatory Group Photo showing everyone who was there? Lots of smiles all around, it must have been a fun workshop!

For the last 35 years, scientists around the world have collaborated on an annual assessment known as “State of the Climate.” Since 1996, the report has been published in a special issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and this year’s “State of the Climate in 2024” has just been released. The report is a collaborative effort by 600 scientists from 58 countries worldwide, and it features important updates on key climate metrics for the atmosphere, land surface, and oceans, from the polar regions to the tropics.

This year’s SoC report highlights the societal impacts of high atmospheric humidity—which has been rising steadily over the past 50 years. High humidity magnifies the impacts of rising temperatures on human health because sweating is less effective—making it even more difficult to cool down on hot days.

Since 2018, the SoC report’s section on Global Climate has also featured a section on phenology, with PhenoCam data, along with John O’Keefe’s observations at Harvard Forest, playing a key role. The 2025 report also includes an analysis (see figure below) of spring phenological anomalies, calculated by the USA-NPN using Mark Schwartz’s “Spring Index Models” (SI-x) compared against anomalies detected at 10 PhenoCam sites across the lower 48.

After more than 15 years relying on the StarDot NetCam SC as the standard camera for the PhenoCam Network, supply chain issues associated with COVID-19 led to the phasing-out, and eventual retirement, of this ultra-reliable IOT device (the Harvard Forest and Proctor Maple Research Center NetCam SC phenocams, both installed in April 2008, are both still running and have together recorded over a half-million images, and the NetCam SC had been previously installed at over 800 PhenoCam sites worldwide, from Massachusetts to Madagascar). The StarDot Live2 camera was suggested as a possible successor, but the off-the-shelf model lacked some essential features needed for phenological applications. Former lab member and BlueGreen Labs founder Koen Hufkens worked extensively with StarDot hardware engineer Dan Lawton to develop the custom firmware and configuration scripts that would enable the Live2 camera to be a viable replacement for the NetCam SC.

Mostafa, Francisco (a visiting PhD student during fall 2024), Koen, and Andrew conducted extensive testing and analysis to ensure that the Live2 camera would be a worthy successor to the NetCam SC. Their analysis has just been published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. A key-takeaway is that the comparable performance of the Live2 to the NetCam SC ensures good continuity in phenological data, thereby supporting the PhenoCam Network’s efforts to serve as a long-term phenological observatory that provides the highest-quality phenological data derived from near-surface remote sensing.

Thank you Koen and Dan for your efforts, and Francisco for your visit!

Lily Newton, an ecohydrology PhD student at New Mexico Tech (Andrew is an external member of her committee) traveled from Socorro, New Mexico, to Flagstaff to learn more about the lab’s work and to share her planned PhD research with the group. During her 3-day visit (thanks to Jen for hosting Lily and giving her a place to stay!), we had a well-attended happy hour at Wanderlust and lunch at Swadee Thai, and Lily had the chance to interact with lab members and learn about the kinds of science we do, and how we do it (phenocams, trace gas measurements, dendrometers, flux towers, and so on). Some of Lily’s work will be conducted at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, where Jacob and Andrew are collaborators on the Mean-Variance Experiment.

The photo shows Oscar, Mostafa, Lily, Perry, Darby, Jen, and Connor in front of Swadee.

Delaney Watkins, an NAU undergraduate and summer 2025 REU program participant hosted by Prof. Mariah Carbone, worked on the Snodgrass Mountain project funded by the DOE ESS program, on which Mariah is the lead PI and Andrew is a co-PI. Delaney measured soil fluxes of methane and carbon dioxide along the Snodgrass elevational gradient using the lab’s LI-7810 CO₂/CH₄/H₂O trace gas analyzer, and found that in both aspen and conifer-dominated stands, subalpine forest soils were consistent methane sinks. She presented her poster on this work at the final NAU REU symposium in early August. Close to 10 Richardson-Carbone lab members showed up to hear about her work. Great job, Delaney, and we look forward to seeing you around the lab in the coming year!

Jacob, Jen, and Andrew made the trip out to NAU’s Historic Hat Ranch property, west of Williams, AZ, to participate in the WildWEST project’s 2025 Summer Camp. WildWEST (Wild-area-networks Wireless Enabling Science Team) is a $5m infrastructure project funded by NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and led by PI Scotty Strachan (a long-time PhenoCam collaborator) of the Nevada System of Higher Education. WildWEST aims to develop the infrastructure, and train workforces, needed to implement “end-to-end data transport solutions for science in remote and challenging environments.” Andrew is a collaborator on the project and serves as a member of the Science Stakeholder Use Case team; his talk focused on some of the challenges the lab has faced in developing two-way communications solutions for projects at the Bartlett AmeriFlux site, the Sevilleta LTER’s Mean-Variance Experiment, and redwood groves at Santa Lucia Preserve. Jen and Jacob had the opportunity to learn about current infrastructure technology and network with WildWEST project leads from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada.

Thanks to Scotty for inviting Andrew and lab members to participate! See you all again in 2026!

The photo shows Andrew, Jen, and Jacob outside of the HHR Straw Bale House.

In early June, Science magazine published a special feature on how plants experience and cope with heat, and how this varies across spatial, temporal, and biological scales. The impacts of rising temperatures and extreme heat on vegetation are critical for ecosystem productivity and resilience, and the ecosystem services on which human society is highly reliant.

While lab members did not have a paper include in the special feature, we did score what might be the next coolest thing: a photograph from the FLIR thermal camera that Andrew and former postdoc Don Aubrecht had mounted on the Niwot Ridge AmeriFlux tower in 2015 (and which ran until 2021) was used in the lead-off article.

Plant temperatures – clearly a hot topic!