Form Submission: Participation Entry

Hemispherical photography is one of the most commonly employed methods to estimate forest canopy structure and understory light environments. Traditional methods require expensive, specialized equipment, are tedious to deploy, and are sensitive to exposure settings. In contrast, modern smartphone cameras are readily available and make use of ever-improving software to produce images with high dynamic range and clarity, but lack suitable hemispherical lenses. Thus, despite the fact that almost all ecologists and foresters carry a high-powered, image processing device in our pockets, we have yet to fully employ it for the purpose of data collection. As an alternative, hemispherical images can be extracted from spherical panoramas produced by many smartphone camera applications.