Phenological Research Methods for Environmental and Climate Change Analysis

About this book

As climate change continues to dominate the international environmental agenda, phenology – the study of the timing of recurring biological events – has received increasing research attention, leading to an emerging consensus that phenology can be viewed as an 'early warning system' for climate change impact. A multidisciplinary science involving many branches of ecology, geography and remote sensing, phenology to date has lacked a coherent methodological text. This new synthesis, including contributions from many of the world's leading phenologists, therefore fills a critical gap in the current biological literature.

Providing critiques of current methods, as well as detailing novel and emerging methodologies, Phenological Research, with its extensive suite of references, provides readers with an understanding of both the theoretical basis and the potential applications required to adopt and adapt new analytical and design methods. An invaluable source book for researchers and students in ecology and climate change science, Phenological Research also provides a useful reference for practitioners in a range of sectors, including human health, fisheries, forestry, agriculture and natural resource management.

Contents

Dedication
Contributing Authors
Foreword

1. Introduction and overview
2. Global Framework for data collection - data bases, data availability, future networks, online databases; E Koch
3. Seasonality as a core business of phenology
4. Societal adaptation options to changes in phenology
5. The influence of sampling method, sample size, and frequency of observations on plant phenological patterns and interpretation in tropical forest trees
6. Regression and causality
7. Combining messy phenological time series
8. Phenology for topoclimatological surveys and large-scale mapping
9. Spatio-temporal statistical methods for modelling land surface phenology
10. Climate influences on the flowering phenology of four eucalypts: a GAMLSS approach
11. Bayesian methods in phenology
12. Smoothing methods
13. Accounting for correlated error structure within phenological data: a case study of trend analysis of snowdrop flowering
14. Modelling for the flowering of four eucalypt species using new mixture transition distribution models
15. Life history mediated responses to weather, phenology and large-scale population patterns
16. Applications of circular statistics in plant phenology: a case studies approach
17. Wavelet analysis of flowering and climate niche identification
18. Singular spectrum analysis: climate niche identification
19. Herbarium collections and photographic images: alternative data sources for phenological records
20. Meta-analysis and its applications in phenological research: a review and new statistical approaches

Colour plates
Index

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