A Time-lapse View of Arctic Plants: Small Sensors Enable Researchers to Study Tundra Seasonality

The timing of plant seasonal growth plays an important role in determining annual ecosystem carbon, water, and energy fluxes. But in the remote Arctic, scientists have had limited options available to accurately characterize plant phenology, where extreme environments pose serious challenges to the long-term unattended operation of scientific equipment. To address this problem, we designed a rugged, low-power camera system (called ‘PiCAM’) that can autonomously collect images of plant seasonal growth. We deployed 26 PiCAMs across three low-Arctic tundra sites on the Seward Peninsula, Alaska in early August 2021. Nearly 70% of the cameras remained active in July 2022, despite the extreme winter temperatures they experienced. We extracted key plant phenology metrics from PiCAM imagery, which showed high phenological diversity across tundra plant species not currently represented in models used to project the fate of the Arctic. For example, shrub species such as alder displayed rapid leaf expansion (completing spring growth within 2 weeks) that has not been captured by traditional field measurements or satellite remote sensing. This research highlights a critical need to characterize seasonality using on-the-ground tools like PiCAM to help improve model representation of tundra vegetation. 

Citation: Yang D, McMahon A, Hantson W, Anderson J, Serbin SP. 2023. PiCAM: A Rasberry Pi-based open source, low-power camera system for monitoring plant phenology in Arctic environments. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14:2974-2984. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.14231 

Associated Data Citation: Yang D, McMahon A, Anderson J, Hanston W, Ely K, Serbin PS. 2023. Digital camera imagery for vegetation phenology, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, 2021-2022. Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic Data Collection, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. Dataset accessed on [01/01/2023] at https://doi.org/10.5440/1992840