The Colors of Heath Flowering

In the project, an algorithm was developed that identifies individual Calluna life-cycles phases and spatially maps the proportion of flowers, fruits and green shoots in the heather. We use a simple red-green-blue camera mounted on an autonomous flying drone to detect the recovery status in different heath stands. The article is published in:

We apply the algortihm over a complete phenological flowering phase in August/September 2019 to answer the following questions:

(1): Which type of regeneration pattern dominates after certain management measures (sprouting from stem base or seedling establishment)?
(2): How does flowering change under different weather conditions in consecutive seasons?
(3): What is the spatio-temporal variability of flowering? What are the driving forces and patterns (competition pollinators, genetic diversity)?
(4): How does regeneration influences individual plant fitness? How does plant age affects intensity of regeneration?

images & text by Neumann, Behling, Gehrmann