The PhenoCam network constitutes one of the largest repositories of real-time near-surface phenology data. Now totaling ~1800 site-years of canopy imagery records, the PhenoCam dataset has reached a critical mass with which to evaluate phenological response to change. NEON PhenoCams represent an especially powerful subset of the PhenoCam network, as in-situ phenological observations are also recorded at regular intervals, forming an essential bridge across observational scales. Concurrently, new methods applied to the vegetation index time series data from MODIS have produced globally consistent land surface phenology products. The opportunity now exists to marry these data, scale PhenoCam and in-situ observations, and improve our constraint of phenological response to climate change and variability.
Results/Conclusions
Here we present PhenoSynth, an open-repository web application that resolves PhenoCam-MODIS data integration, and allows users to visualize, interact with, and download co-located phenological data across multiple sources. This web-tool advances cross-scale analyses by displaying each PhenoCam’s field of view relative to MODIS pixels and assesses vegetation heterogeneity on a remotely-sensed pixel-by-pixel basis. PhenoSynth allows users to evaluate agreement in phenological indices and time series across datasets and store data for further investigation. Through pulling terabytes of phenological data from multiple platforms into the same interface and demonstrating their coherence or overlap, PhenoSynth supports the investigation of phenological response at regional and continental scales, with concrete applications for validation, ecological forecasting, and modeling.