Landscape Phenology from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photography at Harvard Forest 2013

This data set contains orthophotos in the vicinity of the EMS tower at Harvard Forest, as well as the flight logs from the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used to obtain the digital images used in orthophoto creation. Orthophotos were created by mosaicking approximately 200 JPEG images from each date of observation. The orthophotos cover the spatial extent of the 250 meter resolution MODIS pixel that contains the EMS tower. Land cover types in the area of photography include deciduous and evergreen forest, and wetlands. The research goal of data collection for this data set was to observe spatial variance in plant phenology. Therefore, photos were taken from before leaf out until after leaf drop. Orthophotos were collected approximately every 5 days during spring and weekly during fall; see filenames for specific dates. The nominal spatial resolution of the orthophotos is 6 cm, however due to various factors including inaccuracy of the onboard GPS, wind-blown motion of trees, the automated orthophoto mosaicking process, and user error in final georeferencing, image analysis has been conducted at 10 m resolution. The orthophotos are available as GeoTIFF files.