Isabella Ostovary and Maaike de Boer win the Phenology Competition 2023.

As part of her doctoral thesis at ETH Zurich (Chair of Forest Ecology), Isabella Ostovary investigated the effect of climate, stand structure, soil and topography on the leaf unfolding of various tree species such as beech and larch in Switzerland. The leaf unfolding of trees depends not only on temperature, but also on many different environmental factors. The study provides important insights into the influence of various environmental factors on phenology.

In her master's thesis at Wageningen University and Research (WUR, Netherlands), Maaike de Boer used a network of phenocams to identify certain tree species and phenological phases from the photos and to enable them to be assigned to the observation data of the Swiss Phenological Network. The work is an important contribution to the automatic observation of phenological data series.