Skip to main content
2023 ESA Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Contributed Talk

Session: : Climate Change: Ranges And Phenology 4

COS 299-4 - Inferring flowering phenology of wind-pollinated plants with high spatiotemporal resolution imagery

Thursday, August 10, 2023
4:15 PM – 4:30 PM PDT
Location: B118
Abstract: Pollen exposure is likely to exacerbate under future environmental change given changes in flowering phenology, imposing increasing risk of pollen allergy and costs on public health. An improved understanding of flowering and pollen phenology could improve airborne pollen predictions and limit pollen exposure. Previous efforts have been constrained by the limited amount of data on flowering. We propose to tackle this issue with high spatial resolution satellite imagery, complemented by observed pollen count data. Detecting flowers with remote sensing is promising yet challenging for those producing allergenic pollen, as their flowers are usually small and inconspicuous. We developed a novel approach to infer flowering phenology from remotely-sensed individual-level leafing phenology, informed by the observed city-level pollen phenology. We first retrieved PlanetScope data in eight cities in the US and focused on key wind-pollinated taxa. We identified the green-up or green-down timing of individual plants and investigated their link to flowering time. Focusing on the individual level, we showed that green-up time was correlated with flowering time in Detroit oak trees. On the city level, pollen concentration data from stations associated with the National Allergy Bureau allowed us to temporally match city-level leafing phenology with pollen phenology, thus inferring flowering phenology from leafing. This method accurately characterizes flowering phenology, benchmarked with the climatology of the pollen concentration and assessed by cross-validation. We further revealed that the lag between leafing and flowering phenology was correlated with mean annual temperature, suggesting a climatic control on the mechanism of flowering phenology. This study demonstrated a novel and effective approach that enables large-scale flowering detection of wind-pollinated plant taxa, which has great potential in informing ecological and public health studies.