Quantifying vegetation health at Macquarie Island before and after pest species eradication.

[@AnthonyDunk]

Great result! But I wasn't clear if all the images were from around the same time of year or not though. At such a high latitudes, the vegetation difference between winter and summer is probably quite significant, so maybe a further exercise would be to compare this seasonal variation in both 2000 and 2024 to see how much effect that has to rule that out as the cause of the greener "after" result.

[@robertsgeospatial]

Yes, normally I would be careful to compare like-for-like data at the same time of the year, over as tight time range as possible. However, there are so few cloud free days at Macquarie Island that you can't afford to be picky. Note that the "Land" mask that ProRaster Scientific creates for you for the scene from the QA data masks out Ocean, Lakes, Rivers, Clouds, Snow, and Ice (as well as noisy pixels). So, winter data is masked out naturally because the island is snow covered, and cloud-free winter days pretty much don't exist anyway. The result is that there is no data between April and September, and 99% of the data is drawn from December and January. In other words, the analysis is based on summer vegetation cover.