This week marks a full year of images taken of the valley where I live from PlantCam's ridge camera. Because images are uploaded every 15 minutes all day long, we now have over 17,000 images from the same viewpoint! Besides providing pretty pictures that help contextualize the habitat and environmental conditions that me and other native plants are living in, these images have a lot of scientific value in themselves. They are collected as part of the Phenocam network (https://phenocam.sr.unh.edu/) in a way that can be analyzed for changes in vegetation status over time, as well as the timing of leaf, flower and fruiting events (i.e., phenology).
Above is a time lapse video for the entire past year. In it we can see ʻōhiʻa lehua flower blooms, Brazilian pepper tree fruiting (Yuck!), strawberry guava tree canopy growth, and many other things. Look closely- what else can you see that has changed across the landscape in the last year?