Open community forecasts of deciduous forest phenology

Kathryn I. Wheeler, Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA, Chris Jones, Center for Geospatial Analytics, NC State, Raleigh, NC, Michael Dietze, Boston University, Katharine L. Gerst, National Coordinating Office, USA National Phenology Network, Tucson, AZ, Andrew D. Richardson, Center for Ecosystem Science and Society; School of informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, AZ and Bijan Seyednasrollah, School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ

Phenology is a primary ecological fingerprint of climate change and has wide-ranging ecological impacts; however, processes related to vegetation phenological transitions are still not well understood. Ecologists often use digital cameras at fixed points (e.g., PhenoCams) to monitor changes in canopy greenness throughout the year. To improve our ability to understand, model, and predict phenology we developed an open community challenge to forecast spring green-up of daily PhenoCam GCC, which is a greenness metric, at eight NEON deciduous broadleaf sites. Here we describe the challenge and present initial results for over ten teams representing a diversity of modeling approaches.