Speaker: Dr. Alison Post, Earth Lab

With the exponential increase in available environmental data, researchers often lack the coding skills required to efficiently access and manipulate it. For example, the PhenoCam Network provides data from >700 digital cameras that take regular pictures of ecosystem canopies worldwide. PhenoCam is an impactful teaching and research tool to visualize and study seasonal changes in vegetation across diverse ecosystems and under climate change. While the images and data are available in near-real time on the PhenoCam website, they can be more efficiently accessed and downloaded via several R packages. In this interactive workshop, we’ll demonstrate a low-barrier method to access PhenoCam data via R code using GitHub Codespaces, a web-based coding interface. This enables students to quickly start coding without the often-frustrating step of setting up a programming language on their local computers. We’ll walk through an example of GitHub Codespaces using R to access PhenoCam imagery and plot time series of vegetation greenness. No prior knowledge of coding or PhenoCam is required.

Please bring your laptops, and create a GitHub account ahead of time if you don’t already have one (https://github.com/).

Links for workshop: 
PhenoCam website: https://phenocam.nau.edu

Digital Textbook page: https://cu-esiil-edu.github.io/esiil-learning-portal/mefa/notebooks/07-phenocam/phenocam.html