Vegetation Changes of a Decade

Abstract

As biologists observed a decrease of deer events since 2013, possibly as a result of mountain lion migrations, it is an interesting topic to look at how vegetation changed in response to absence of deer. We applied two methods to the camera trap photos taken by Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (JRBP): illumination-aware compositing plus green chromatic coordinate, and edge detection to quantify the amount of vegetation. Results show that vegetation growth, measured in greenness and number of edge pixels, is correlated with weather (precipitation mostly), but not strongly with deer event counts.