Study of Impact of Urbanization 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 through changing the local climate such as temperature, humidity, wind speed etc. To understand how much urbanization would impact on phenology, we identified the phenological transition dates based on NDVI from SPOT/VGT and developed an urban index ranges from 0-1 to represent intensity of urbanization using data from Defense Satellite Meteorological Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS). It is found that there´s an insignificant linear relationship between urban index and phenological transition dates anomaly. An increase of 0.1 in urbanization index will cause about 4.1 days advancement of greenup onset and 1.3 days delay of dormancy onset.