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Andrew Richardson
Associate professor
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University

The orbit of the earth around the sun gives us the rhythm of the seasons, driving changes in both weather and day length that have profound effects on how plants and ecosystems work. Phenology is the term given to the scientific study of this seasonality, and Harvard Forest, located in central Massachusetts about 100 km west of the city of Boston, is currently a hotspot of phenological research.

Work in my own lab at Harvard University focuses on phenology, but we use a modern approach. For the last decade, we have been mounting digital cameras at research sites across North America – over 250 of them. Using the images from these cameras, recorded every 30 minutes from dusk ‘til dawn, we track seasonal changes in vegetation color. This gives us a very quantitative measure of phenology.

I was happy to help the Earth’s Greatest Spectacles team to document the New England forests changing over the course of a year. We quickly sourced cameras capable of delivering the HD-quality images that were required, and soon my postdoc Don and I were climbing towers (some of them only 50 cm wide and over 40 m high!) across New England, and installing a new set of cameras for the 麻豆官网首页入口. We got them up and running just as the leaves were starting to come out.

If you are interested, you can view the latest images, and browse the image archive, from the 麻豆官网首页入口 cameras on the .

Here are my two favorites: