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This weekend, Darby (shown below), Perry, and Rosie, an Ecoss undergraduate student, staffed the Ecoss booth at the Festival of Science’s “Science in the Park” event, and it was a hit! Kids and parents got to test their lungs in our “How much CO₂ can you blow?” competition using the lab’s Flux Puppy CO₂ measurement system. One superstar kid set a record at 39,200 ppm—that’s almost 4%! Through the challenge, they learned how our instruments measure CO₂ and other gases, and then guessed which mason jar ecosystem—aquatic or terrestrial—was producing more CO₂. Most guessed correctly: the jar with soil from a local ponderosa pine forest was the winner! We also had a station for spying on plants with digital cameras. A poster of PhenoCam images from Bartlett Experimental Forest showed how the forest changes through the seasons, and kids had fun identifying the start, peak, and end of the growing season. The beauty of these seasonal transitions even moved one visitor to tears! Overall, it was another fun, inspiring, and successful event. 

NAU’s Advanced Research Computing Group (ARC) hosted an “HPC Day”, complete with a keynote address, workshops, and lightning talks. The event was a great opportunity for lab members to meet up with other members of NAU’s Monsoon HPC, and to meet face-to-face with ARC staff. Yujie gave a presentation in the lightning talks session, “Using HPC for gap-filling ecosystem fluxes”. The event was a huge hit, and thanks to ARC Director and PhenoCam collaborator Chris Coffey for organizing it!

With massive input from the lab, Andrew assembled a short video that emphasizes how PhenoCam imagery can convey the stories of how different ecosystems experience the passing of the seasons. The video will be shown at the Ecoss booth at the Flagstaff Festival of Science event, “Science in the Park.”

Jen’s paper, “Drivers of canopy temperature dynamics across diverse ecosystems”, has been published in Environmental Research Letters. This is the first of Jen’s thesis chapters to be published. Using data from 36 NEON sites across a range of vegetaion types, the paper takes an empirical approach to understanding how different environmental factors interact to drive the gradient between canopy temperature (Tcan) and air temperature (Tair). Incoming shortwave radiation was the dominant driver of daytime ∆T, and within vegetation types, the analysis shows similar sensitivities to all environmental drivers. An important finding is that the maximum Tcan–Tair gradient was well-correlated with vegetation height, which is thought to be related to the correlation between vegetation height and surface roughness, and impacts of roughness on canopy-atmosphere cooling. Congratulations, Jen!

Jen and Andrew are coauthors on a new paper out in PNAS, “Cooling outweighs warming across phenological transitions in the Northern Hemisphere”. Led by collaborator Lin Meng and her student Yizhuo Li at Vanderbilt, the paper shows that vegetation exerts a dominant surface cooling effect during phenological transitions in mid- to high-latitude forests, with amplified cooling under climate warming in many regions. Andrew’s PhenoCam data were used to identify phenological transition dates at 17 AmeriFlux sites, and Jen analyzed long-wave radiation data from those tower sites to develop a land surface temperature dataset used to ground-truth patterns that had been initially identified from satellite remote sensing. 

It’s been three years since the last Biennial Conference of Science & Management, but this year the meeting was back and better than ever! Hosted at NAU, the conference focuses work related to the ecosystems of the Colorado Plateau and Southwestern United States. The meeting is attended by resource managers and research scientists whose work specifically focuses on the Southwest’s natural and cultural resources. Darby, Jacob and Mostafa led a workshop on “Using open-source PhenoCam imagery and data to monitor vegetation change in drylands and beyond”, and then Jacob and Mostafa chaired an organized session, “Understanding the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change on Colorado Plateau Drylands Using Field-Based Approaches”. Thanks everyone for your participation in this fantastic event, and especially to our collaborators and friends who made the effort to travel here from Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Tucson. 

The photo below shows the speakers and audience from the organized session led by Jacob and Mostafa. The session was hugely popular — standing room only!

Congratulations on a highly successful event!

Where should I eat when I am in Flagstaff? Where should I stay? What brewery has the best beer? What are the can’t-miss scenic highlights? Richardson Lab members get these kinds of questions from both short- and long-term visitors to the lab, as well as family and friends who may be just passing through town quickly, or here for a longer vacation.

We therefore decided to compile a guide, “The Richardson Lab’s  Guide for Visitors to Flagstaff: Restaurants, Coffeehouses, Bars & Breweries, Things to See & Do, Hotels, and Medical Facilities.” An initial version of the Guide was assembled last summer by Jen for participants in the Great Thermal Bake-off Workshop. Updates and new entries were added this year by Jen, Jacob, Oscar, Yujie, and Darby.

You can download a copy of the guide below, or through the “Information For Visitors” tab under the dropdown Menu at the top of this page.

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.