Monitoring the Seasonal Functioning of Tropical Ecosystems With Phenocams

ABSTRACT

Phenology is an essential biodiversity variable, but land surface phenology is challenging in cloudy tropical regions while field observations are time-consuming and sparse in time. Phenocams offer opportunities that have been barely explored in Africa. Here, we present the first results of a phenocam network installed in Gabon. The 2 years of images show the seasonal and bimodal functioning of forest canopy, mimicking rainfall seasonality and the unimodal functioning of savanna, associated with the long dry season and fire. This work is encouraging though the challenge is to maintain phenocams over the long-term and automate the signal analysis.