The effect of seasonal spectral variation on species classification in the Panamanian tropical forest

We explore the effect of inter-seasonal spectral variation on the potential for automated classification methods to accurately discern species of trees and lianas from high-resolution spectral data collected at the leaf level at two tropical forest sites. Through the application of data reduction techniques and classification methods to leaf-level spectral data collected at sites in Panama, we found that in all cases the structure and organization of spectrally-derived taxonomies varied substantially between seasons. We further found that the classification accuracy dropped by a factor of 10 when seasonality was not considered. This study represents one of the first systematic investigations of leaf-level specro-temporal variability, an appreciation for which is crucial to the advancement of species classification methods, with broad applications within the environmental sciences. Key wordsleaf optical properties; seasonality; spectrotemporal variability; dry tropical forest