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Detection of relative differences in phenology of forest species using Landsat and MODIS

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Abstract

Landsat imagery is routinely used to characterize stand-level forest communities, but low temporal resolution makes pixel-wise characterization of phenology difficult. This limitation can be overcome by using multi-year imagery, but organizing Landsat scenes by calendar date ignores phenological gradients across the landscape as well as inter-annual differences in both scene- and pixel-wise phenology. We demonstrate how a spatially generalizable, phenologically-informed approach for re-ordering Landsat pixels can be used to characterize spatial variations in autumn senescence in several forest tree species. Using end-of-season estimates derived from MODIS phenology data, we determined the “days left in season” (DLiS) across Landsat images to produce a synthesized phenological trajectory of the normalized difference infrared index (NDII). We used ground-based species composition data in conjunction with the NDII trajectories to model autumn senescence by species. Absolute phenology differed by one and a half to 3 weeks between northern and southern Wisconsin, USA, but we show that the relative timing of phenology for individual species differs across regions by only 1–3 days when considering senescence with respect to the local end of the season. The progression of species senescence was consistent in lowland stands, starting with green and black ash, followed by silver maple, yellow birch, red maple, and tamarack. The image analyses suggest that senescence progressed more rapidly in southern than northern Wisconsin, starting earlier but taking about ten more days in the north. Our results support the use of MODIS phenological data with multi-year Landsat imagery to detect species with unique phenologies and identify how these vary across the landscape.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Two anonymous reviewers provided feedback that greatly improved the manuscript. The authors would like to thank Jane Cummings-Carlson for collaborative support, Aditya Singh for discussion and computing support, Clayton Kingdon for help with editing and image processing, Peter Wolter for in-depth discussions, and Suming Jin for processing insights. Thanks also to Kelly Doyle, Jennifer Limbach, and Angelique Edgerton, and Nathan Rehberg for field assistance. Finally, we would like to thank the USGS for opening the Landsat data archive.

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  1. Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 226 Russell Laboratories, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Bernard N. Isaacson, Shawn P. Serbin & Philip A. Townsend

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  1. Bernard N. Isaacson
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  2. Shawn P. Serbin
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  3. Philip A. Townsend
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Correspondence to Bernard N. Isaacson.

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Isaacson, B.N., Serbin, S.P. & Townsend, P.A. Detection of relative differences in phenology of forest species using Landsat and MODIS. Landscape Ecol 27, 529–543 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9703-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9703-x

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