Hard to believe, but it’s been 20 years since a webcam was first put atop the Bartlett Experimental Forest AmeriFlux tower! The pictures from the Axis 211 weren’t great (the first recorded image, just before noon on October 4 2005 is shown below), but they were good enough. The data led to a 2007 paper in Oecologia that concluded “A network of cameras could offer a novel opportunity to implement a regional or national phenology monitoring program.” It turns out, that was a pretty good idea! This review paper in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology provides a more complete history of the PhenoCam network.
