Obtaining PhenoCam Images

PhenoCam imagery can be obtained from web cameras registered with the University of New Hampshire's PhenoCam website.

To obtain images, one must first register and/or login, and then navigate to the PhenoCam Data webpage.

From the data webpage, images from any PhenoCam site can be bulk-downloaded according to the following user-defined parameters:

• Site: The PhenoCam site's name. Each sitename is a single unique, lowercase word (e.g., ninemileprairie).
• Start Date: The beginning date from which to obtain images. Dates are in YYYY-MM-DD format (e.g., data since June 1st 2011 would be represented as 2011-06-01).
• End Date: The end date from which to obtain images. As with start date, format should be YYYY-MM-DD.
• Start Time of Day: Time of day to start getting images from. Times are in a 24 hour HH:MM format (e.g., obtaining data starting at 8 AM would be represented as 8:00)
• End Time of Day: Cutoff time for obtaining images. As with Start Time of Day, times are in 24 hour HH:MM format. An end time of 2 PM would be represented as 14:00.
• IR Images: Check this option if you wish to download IR imagery, if available. Checking this option will ONLY download IR images. If you wish to obtain both IR and RGB images, submit two requests (one with and without the IR flag checked)

It should be noted that downloads are limited to 1 GB in size. For obtaining large time-series of images, it is recommended that one limit downloads to shorter spans of time and/or limit the hours of day for which to obtain images. For example, one may need to download five years worth of data two months at a time.

Example:

If one desired to obtain all RGB images from the harvard PhenoCam site between 11 AM and 2:30 PM for the 2011 year, the parameters explained above would be filled out as follows:

• Site: harvard
• Start Date: 2011-01-01
• End Date: 2011-12-31
• Start Time of Day: 11:00
• End Time of Day: 14:30
• IR Images: []

Clicking 'Submit' will redirect the user to a Data Request page providing an overview of the specified parameters. A zipped data archive will begin to download, which can be extracted to a folder of the user's choice once complete.

The archive will be extracted to a folder phenocamdata/ with the following directory structure:

└───harvard  
    └───2014   
        ├───01   
        ├───02   
        ├───03
        ├───04
        ├───05
        ├───06
        ├───07
        ├───08
        ├───09
        ├───10
        ├───11
        └───12

In other words, at the topmost level is a folder named after the site, followed by a folder for each year, within which is a folder for each month of downloaded data. Each month folder contains the PhenoCam images downloaded for that month.

PhenoCam image filename conventions

PhenoCam images have a standard naming convention which allows one to quickly recognize the origin, date, and time of any PhenoCam image.

The standard filename convention for RGB PhenoCam images is:

sitename_YYYY_MM_DD_HHNNSS.jpg

The standard filename convention for IR PhenoCam images is:

sitename_IR_YYYY_MM_DD_HHNNSS.jpg