Remote Sensing at Acadia National Park, Part 2

Yan Liu from School for the Environment, University of Massachusetts Boston joined Caitlin for the week of June 8^th to walk the phenology transects up and down three mountains at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Her goal was to make comparison of leaf out phenology data from these three transects with 30m resolution imagery of leaf out times from two Landsat satellites,  Landsat 7 and Landsat 8. The two satellites normally overfly an area on the Earth once every 8 days, but we are fortunately that the Acadia region lies in the overlap area between swaths and therefore is imaged on two subsequent days during an 8 day period. This maximizes our opportunities to get a cloud free image of the area and adequately capture the phenology of leaf out from space. We are interested in seeing how well the relatively coarse resolution Landsat imagery can capture the elevational differences of leaf out that Caitlin is recording on the ground.

These two Landsat 8 true color composite images show the changes that have been occurring during the spring green up of the vegetation at Acadia in 2014.  On May 7 the deciduous trees and shrubs on the mountains of Mount Desert Island are still mostly leafless, while by June 8 they have leafed out.