Vermont Forest Indicators Dashboard

Growing Season Length

Score for 2016:
--/5
Long-Term Trend:
Scores are 
The length of the growing season varies from year to year based spring and fall temperatures. Increases in the length of growing season can benefit some species by providing extra time for growth and reproduction, but can cause harm to others by increasing heat, water, and metabolic stress1. Also, when the growing season begins very early in the spring, there can be increased risk of frost damage to newly emerging leaves. Here, we quantify the growing season as the number of days between spring leaf emergence and fall leaf senescence using MODIS satellite images. The current year is scored as the different from the long-term mean.
1Rustad, L., Campbell, J., Dukes, J.S., Huntington, T., Lambert, K.F., Mohan, J. and Rodenhouse, N., 2012. Changing climate, changing forests: The impacts of climate change on forests of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.