No Consistent Evidence for Advancing or Delaying Trends in Spring Phenology on the Tibetan Plateau

Precipitation impacts on vegetation spring phenology on the Tibetan Plateau.

The ongoing changes in vegetation spring phenology in temperate/cold regions are widely attributed to temperature. However, in arid/semiarid ecosystems, the correlation between spring temperature and phenology is much less clear. We test the hypothesis that precipitation plays an important role in the temperature dependency of phenology in arid/semiarid regions. We therefore investigated the in...

Spring phenology was not consistently related to winter warming on the Tibetan Plateau.

Increasing contamination might have delayed spring phenology on the Tibetan Plateau.

Using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Global Inventory, Monitoring, and Modeling Studies (GIMMS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) dataset (1982–2006), Yu et al. (1) found that the trend of advancing spring phenology for alpine steppe and meadow was reversed around 2000, despite the increasing air temperature over the Tibetan Plateau. This phenomenon cannot ...

Reply to Shen et al. No evidence to show nongrowing season NDVI affects spring phenology trend in the Tibetan Plateau over the last decade.

We appreciate the comments on our article (1) from Shen et al. (2). They raise the issue of whether the nongrowing season (NGS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) could affect spring phenology as interpreted from time series NDVI data. To address it, they compared the NGS NDVIs of two separate periods (1998–2000 and 2009–2011) and found a higher 2009–2011 NGS NDVI than that of 1998–2...

Precipitation trends in Southeast Tibetan Plateau

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