Assessing Vegetation Phenology across Different Biomes in Temperate China—Comparing GIMMS and MODIS NDVI Datasets

Assessing vegetation phenology is very important for better understanding the impact of climate change on the ecosystem, and many vegetation index datasets from different remote sensors have been used to quantify vegetation phenology from a regional to global perspective. This study mainly analyzes the similarities and differences in phenology derived from GIMMS NDVI3g and MODIS NDVI datasets across different biomes throughout temperate China. We applied three commonly used methods to extract the start and end of the growing season (SOS and EOS) from two datasets between 2000 and 2015, and analyzed the spatio-temporal characteristics and trends of key phenological parameters between these two datasets in temperate China. Results showed that the multi-year mean GIMMS NDVI was higher than MODIS NDVI throughout most of temperate China, and the consistencies between GIMMS NDVI and MODIS NDVI for all biomes in the senescence phase were better than those in the green-up phase. NDVI differences between GIMMS and MODIS resulted in some distinctions between phenology derived from the two datasets. The results of SOS and EOS for three methods also showed wide discrepancies in spatial patterns, especially in SOS. For different biomes, differences of SOS in forests were obviously less than that in shrublands, grasslands-IM, grasslands-QT and meadows, whereas the differences of EOS in forests were relatively greater than that in SOS. Moreover, large differences of phenological trends were found between GIMMS and MODIS datasets from 2000 to 2015 in entire region and different biomes, and it is particularly noteworthy that both SOS and EOS showed a low proportion of the identical significant trends. The results suggested NDVI datasets obtained from GIMMS and MODIS sensors could induce the differences of the inversion of vegetation phenology in some degree due to the differences of instrumental characteristics between these two sensors. These findings highlighted that inter-calibrate datasets derived from different satellite sensors for some biomes (e.g., grasslands) should be needed when analyzing land surface phenology and their trends, and also provided baseline information for choosing different NDVI datasets in subsequent studies on vegetation patterns and dynamics.