Phenology is an integrative environmental science which encompasses biometeorology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Monitoring vegetation phenology thus helps to provide a reference framework to track vegetation dynamics related to disturbances and stress events such as drought, fire, spring frost, land use changes, climate variations, etc. Phenological studies can be performed both through small scale and large-scale investigations: the former by means of ground-based and proximal sensing studies, the latter using remotely-sensed observations. Both proximal and remote sensing techniques are based on deriving vegetation indices (VIs), e.g. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Leaf Area Index (LAI), fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR), etc., from spectral sensors. The evolution of such VIs through time exhibits a strong correlation with the typical vegetation growth stages and provides a measurement of plant phenological characteristics that are independent of taxonomic or phylogenetic linkages. This has created opportunities to expand the concept of vegetation functional types, and to investigate plant functional properties from completely new perspectives. The overall goal of this project is therefore to gain a better understanding of plant ecophysiological dynamics by measuring and monitoring the phenological responses at both leaf- and landscape-scale of different plant species through proximal and remote sensing techniques. The identification of 'plant phenological types' represents a novel way of thinking about plant categories. The major innovation of the proposed approach is the ability to go beyond the structural characteristics of plants to look instead at their functional aspects in terms of e.g. understanding of the converging climate adaptation of different species, localization of the ecological niche at large scale, or recognition of phenological responses to environmental stress.
