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Journal ArticleDOI

Intercomparison, interpretation, and assessment of spring phenology in North America estimated from remote sensing for 1982-2006

TLDR
In this paper, the authors assess 10 start-of-spring (SOS) methods for North America between 1982 and 2006 and find that SOS estimates were more related to the first leaf and first flowers expanding phenological stages.
Abstract
Shifts in the timing of spring phenology are a central feature of global change research. Long-term observations of plant phenology have been used to track vegetation responses to climate variability but are often limited to particular species and locations and may not represent synoptic patterns. Satellite remote sensing is instead used for continental to global monitoring. Although numerous methods exist to extract phenological timing, in particular start-of-spring (SOS), from time series of reflectance data, a comprehensive intercomparison and interpretation of SOS methods has not been conducted. Here, we assess 10 SOS methods for North America between 1982 and 2006. The techniques include consistent inputs from the 8 km Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer NDVIg dataset, independent data for snow cover, soil thaw, lake ice dynamics, spring streamflow timing, over 16 000 individual measurements of ground-based phenology, and two temperature-driven models of spring phenology. Compared with an ensemble of the 10 SOS methods, we found that individual methods differed in average day-of-year estimates by � 60 days and in standard deviation by � 20 days. The ability of the satellite methods to retrieve SOS estimates was highest in northern latitudes and lowest in arid, tropical, and Mediterranean ecoregions. The ordinal rank of SOS methods varied geographically, as did the relationships between SOS estimates and the cryospheric/hydrologic metrics. Compared with ground observations, SOS estimates were more related to the first leaf and first flowers expanding phenological stages. We found no evidence for time trends in spring arrival from ground- or model-based data; using an ensemble estimate from two methods that were more closely related to ground observations than other methods, SOS

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Special Topic: The Tibetan Plateau Plant phenological responses to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau: research status and challenges

TL;DR: In this paper, a review of the role of phenology in ecosystem responses and feedback processes to climate change remains to be solved, and the authors recommend that addressing the following questions should be a high priority: How did other phenological events change, such as flowering and fruiting phenology? What are the influences from environmental changes other than temperature and precipitation, including human activities such as grazing? How does phenological change influence ecosystem structure and function at different scales and feedback to climate system?
Book ChapterDOI

Spring Phenology of the Boreal Ecosystems

TL;DR: In this article, a remote sensing green-up retrieval method designed to avoid signal contamination by snow was presented, and the result validation with ground observations showed that the method caught the interannual variations in phenology of the plant community.
Book ChapterDOI

Agro-ecological Lower Midland Zones IV and V in Kenya Using GIS and Remote Sensing for Climate-Smart Crop Management

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined previous methods used in classifying agro-ecological zones and further provided additional insightful parameters that can be adopted to enable farmers understand and adapt better to the current variable and unpredictable cropping seasons.
Journal ArticleDOI

Remotely-sensed trends in vegetation productivity and phenology during population decline of the Bathurst caribou herd

TL;DR: The Bathurst caribou herd declined from ~349,000 animals in 1996 to ~8,200 in 2018, and climate-driven changes to tundra and boreal vegetation is one hypothesis for the decline as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Multi-Climate Factors and the Preceding Growth Stage of Vegetation Co-Regulated the Variation of the End of Growing Season in Northeast Inner Mongolia, China

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used four smoothing methods to obtain EOS dates from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in northeast Inner Mongolia (NIM) between 2001-2017.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change

TL;DR: Range-restricted species, particularly polar and mountaintop species, show severe range contractions and have been the first groups in which entire species have gone extinct due to recent climate change.
Journal ArticleDOI

Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity

TL;DR: It is shown that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons.
Journal ArticleDOI

Increased plant growth in the northern high latitudes from 1981 to 1991

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present evidence from satellite data that the photosynthetic activity of terrestrial vegetation increased from 1981 to 1991 in a manner that is suggestive of an increase in plant growth associated with a lengthening of the active growing season.
Journal ArticleDOI

North american regional reanalysis

TL;DR: The North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) project as mentioned in this paper uses the NCEP Eta model and its Data Assimilation System (at 32-km-45-layer resolution with 3-hourly output) to capture regional hydrological cycle, the diurnal cycle and other important features of weather and climate variability.
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