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ARS Home » Plains Area » Las Cruces, New Mexico » Range Management Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #428247
Research Project: Knowledge Systems and Tools to Increase the Resilience and Sustainability of Western Rangeland Agriculture

Location: Range Management Research

Title: Tracking vegetation phenology across diverse biomes using Version 3.0 of the PhenoCam Dataset

Author
item YOUNG, ADAM - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
item HUFKENS, KOEN - Consultant
item BALLOU, KEITH - Northern Arizona University
item JAVADIAN, MOSTAFA - Northern Arizona University
item POST, ALISON - University Of Colorado
item SCHÄDEL, CHRISTINA - Woodwell Climate Research Center
item Browning, Dawn
item FLORIAN, CHRISTOPHER - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
item MOON, MINKYU - Kangwon National University
item RICHARDSON, ANDREW - Northern Arizona University

Submitted to: American Geophysical Union
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/26/2025
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Vegetation phenology — the recurring seasonal events in the life cycles of plants (e.g., leaf emergence and senescence) — is tightly coupled with complex land-surface and ecological dynamics, such as the surface-energy balance and ecosystem productivity. Understanding and linking vegetation phenology to broader ecosystem impacts from local to macro scales requires high-quality phenological datasets that span multiple years and a wide range of ecoclimatic conditions. Here, we present version 3.0 (V3.0) of the PhenoCam dataset, which has been fully curated and is now publicly available. This PhenoCam data product offers continuously collected and quality-controlled phenology time series of canopy greenness and phenological transition dates (e.g., spring green-up). These data are derived from near-surface remote sensing imagery of digital cameras, where each camera has a clear field-of-view of ecosystem canopies and records digital RGB and IR images every 15-30 minutes. PhenoCam V3.0 offers significant updates to the previous version (V2.0), increasing in coverage by 170% from 1783 to 4805.5 site years, with notable expansion for evergreen broadleaf forests, understory vegetation, grasslands, wetlands, and agricultural ecosystems. Furthermore, PhenoCam V3.0 now offers cameraNDVI, a new data product calculated from back-to-back RGB and RGB+IR images using a sliding cut filter. Comparative analyses reveal that both cameraNDVI and the default greenness metric from PhenoCam (green chromatic coordinate, GCC) generally capture seasonal vegetation change, with GCC providing a smoother or “less noisy” signal with lower day-to-day variance at most sites relative to cameraNDVI. This updated release will provide a key resource for modeling and studying ecosystem dynamics in the context of ongoing environmental changes. The PhenoCam V3.0 data release is publicly available for download from the Oak Ridge National Lab Distributed Active Archive Center (https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2389).