get_last_date function

Get the last date from a phenology record

When looking at multi-year phenology records, it is normally obvious in which year bloom occurred last. Determining this with an automated procedure, however, is a bit tricky, when the range of phenological dates spans across a calendar year transition. This function finds the latest phenological date of the record. This is the date before the longest phenological date gap.

get_last_date(dates, first = FALSE)

Arguments

• dates: numeric vector of Julian dates (days of the year)
• first: boolean variable that can be set to TRUE to get the first, not the last, date of the phenology record.

Returns

the latest (earliest) date of the series, under the assumption that the longest period without bloom can be interpreted as separating the phenological seasons. This should be a reasonable assumption in most cases.

Examples

get_last_date(c(1,3,6,8,10,25))
get_last_date(c(345,356,360,365,2,5,7,10))
get_last_date(c(345,356,360,365,2,5,7,10),first=TRUE)

Author(s)

Eike Luedeling