Study of Impacts of Urbanization Process on Phenology Using Multisource Satellite Data

Phenology is an indicator of the impact of climate on vegetation. As the representation of human activities, urbanization affects vegetation phenology by changing the local climate such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. Recent studies starts to focus on the impacts of urbanization intensity on phenology. In order to understand the relationship between urbanization intensity and phenology, we identified the phenological transitional dates based on NDVI from SPOT/VGT and used a eveloped urban index ranges from 0-1 to represent intensity of urbanization using data from Defense Satellite Meteorological Program – Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS). The relationship between urban index and phenological transition dates from 1999 to 2002 were analyzed. It is found that there’s a not-so significant linear relationship between urban index and phenological transitional dates anomaly. However, when the excluded the biophysical factors, the local climatic variation is the key factor determining the phenology anomaly, while urbanization level also has influence on it.