With global warming, an advance in spring leaf phenology has been reported worldwide. However, it is difficult to forecast phenology for a given species, due to a lack of knowledge about chilling requirements. We quantified chilling and heat requirements for leaf unfolding in two European tree species and investigated their relative contributions to phenological variations between and within po...

To identify countermeasures to the effects of climate warming on crop production, we mustunderstand the changes in crop phenology and the relationships between phenology and climatechange and cultivar. We used summer maize phenological and climate data in the North ChinaPlain, collected from 1981 to 2010. This study analyzed the spatiotemporal trends inphenological data and lengths of different...

Land surface phenological cycles of vegetation greening and browning are influenced by variability in climatic forcing. Quantitative spatial information on phenological cycles and their variability is important for agricultural applications, wildfire fuel accumulation, land management, land surface modeling, and climate change studies. Most phenology studies have focused on temperature-driven N...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Climate change has resulted in major changes in the phenology of some species but not others. Long-term field observational records provide the best assessment of these changes, but geographic and taxonomic biases limit their utility. Plant specimens in herbaria have been hypothesized to provide a wealth of additional data for studying phenological responses to climatic cha...

Several methods exist for extracting plant phenological information from time series of satellite data. However, there have been only a few successful attempts to temporarily match satellite observations (Land Surface Phenology or LSP) with ground based phenological observations (Ground Phenology or GP). The classical pixel to point matching problem along with the temporal and spatial resolutio...

Bush encroachment is a form of land degradation prominent worldwide, but particularly present in semi-arid areas. In this study, we mapped the spatial distribution of the two encroacher species, Acacia mellifera and Acacia reficiens, in Central Namibia, based on their different phenological behavior. We used constrained principal curves to extract a one dimensional gradient of phenological chan...

Shifts in the timing of life history events have become an important source of information about how organisms are responding to climate change. Phenological data have generally been treated as purely temporal, with scant attention to the inherent spatial aspects of such data. However, phenological data are tied to a specific location, and considerations of sampling design, both over space and ...