Spatiotemporal Variability in Start and End of Growing Season in China Related to Climate Variability

Abstract

Satellite-derived vegetation phenophases are frequently used to study the response of ecosystems to climate change. However, limited studies have identified the common phenological variability across different climate and vegetation zones. Using NOAA/Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) dataset, we estimated start of growing season (SOS) and end of growing season (EOS) for Chinese vegetation during the period 1982-2012 based on the Midpoint method. Subsequently, the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis was applied to extract the main patterns of phenophases and their annual variability. The impact of climate parameters such as temperature and precipitation on phenophases was investigated using canonical correlation analysis (CCA). The first EOF mode of phenophases exhibited widespread earlier or later SOS and EOS signals for almost the whole country. The attendant time coefficients revealed an earlier SOS between 1996 and 2008, but a later SOS in 1982-1995 and 2009-2012. Regarding EOS, it was clearly happening later in recent years, mainly after 1993. The preseason temperature contributed to such spatiotemporal phenological change significantly. The first pair of CCA patterns for phenology and preseason temperature was found to be similar and its time coefficients were highly correlated to each other (correlation coefficient >0.7). These results indicate that there is a substantial amount of common variance in SOS and EOS across different vegetation types that is related to large-scale modes of climate variability.

Forest Phenology Dynamics to Climate Change and Topography in a Geographic and Climate Transition Zone: The Qinling Mountains in Central China

“…Therefore, a longer duration of cooling, in days, is required at high altitudes to initiate a delayed EOS. This finding is consistent with other studies [71][72][73]. Crabbe et al [71] showed that warmer temperatures in extreme warm autumn events lead to significantly delayed EOS for needle leaf evergreen forest, broad-leaf deciduous forests, and mixed forests.…”

Asymmetric Responses of the End of Growing Season to Daily Maximum and Minimum Temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau

“…Among the multiple preseason (here preseason refers to the period preceding a certain phonological date in which a climate factor has strongest impact on that phonology event; details are given in the method section) meteorological factors that could explain these changes, low temperature was identified as a major driver of leaf senescence in autumn (Cong, Shen, & Piao, ; Ding et al, ; Ge et al, ; Jeong et al, ; Liu, Fu, Zeng, et al, ; Liu, Fu, Zhu, et al, ; Marchand et al, ; Yang et al, ; Zeng et al, ; Zhao et al, ). In most of these studies, the interannual variations in the date of autumn phenology onset were related to daily mean temperature.…”

Spatiotemporal Variability of Land Surface Phenology in China from 2001–2014

“…This is especially true since the year 2000, a time during which China has experienced remarkably strong El Niño events [22]. Moreover, such research in China has mainly focused on SOS changes in temperate China [17,19,20,23]; to the best of our knowledge, few studies [20,24] have considered or discussed corresponding EOS or LOS changes. More importantly, previous studies of SOS within the Tibetan Plateau have reached contradictory conclusions [23,25] that appear to have depended on datasets or methodology.…”