Plants are amazing indicators of environmental health. Photos of plants taken from outdoor picture posts can help you assess the health of your local environment while helping scientists monitor regional to global environmental change.

This guide provides some examples of how to use photographs to:

Measure plant growth (height, width, & leaf cover)

Observe the timing of plant lifecycles

Measure densities of plant populations

Track spread of invasive species

To measure these changes, you’ll need the free MVHimage software.

Little Fresh Pond, Cambridge, MA

The following examples demonstrate how MVHimage is used to measure plant growth and observe the timing of plant lifecycles.

Measuring Rate of Plant Growth

The “line tool” allows you to calculate lengths of objects in a photograph.

In the photographs to the right, an entire plant visible in the foreground is observed between June 11-19, 2005.

When no scale is available, the “line tool” indicates the length of an object as the number of pixels. Since the plant is always the same distance from the post, the measurements represent the actual height of the plant.

On June 11, the plant measured 403 pixels, and by June 19, it was 426 pixels tall. This means that the plant grew 5.7% in height in 8 days.

Changes in growth patterns over time indicate improving or degrading environmental conditions locally.

Observe the Timing of Plant Cycles

Key life cycles of plants,

Budding,
Flowering,
Fruiting,
Green Up (when plants form), and
Green Down (when plants fall),

depend on environmental conditions such as temperature and the amount of water and sunlight. Tracking the dates these lifecycles occur is an important way scientists monitor regional to global environmental changes.

In the "Display Tool" Feature of MVHimage, select color range to isolate in the PicturePost pictures. When properly selected, we can measure the amount of leaf cover for trees.