Abstract
Mediterranean coastal areas are experiencing rapid land cover change caused by human-induced land degradation and extreme climatic events. Vegetation index time series provide a useful way to monitor vegetation phenological variations. This study quantitatively describes Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) temporal changes for Mediterranean land-covers from the perspective of vegetation phenology and its relation with climate. A time series from 2001 to 2007 of the MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index 16-day composite (MOD13Q1) was analyzed to extract anomalies (by calculating z-scores) and frequency domain components (by the Fourier Transform). Vegetation phenology analyses were developed for diverse land-covers for an area in south Alicante (Spain) providing a useful way to analyze and understand the phenology associated to those land-covers. Time series of climatic variables were also analyzed through anomaly detection techniques and the Fourier Transform. Correlations between EVI time series and climatic variables were computed. Temperature, rainfall and radiation were significantly correlated with almost all land-cover classes for the harmonic analysis amplitude term. However, vegetation phenology was not correlated with climatic variables for the harmonic analysis phase term suggesting a delay between climatic variations and vegetation response.
Highlights
Human activities can generate severe negative impacts in the Earth system, resulting in environmental changes greater than natural variability [1]
This study provided an application of time series anomalies and harmonic analysis to extract information about vegetation phenology from a vegetation index time series
The minimization of the soil background effect, which has a great influence on semiarid ecosystems such as in Southeast Spain, on the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) vegetation index was a key aspect to select it for analysis and valuable information could be extracted with selected time series analysis techniques
Summary
Human activities can generate severe negative impacts in the Earth system, resulting in environmental changes greater than natural variability [1]. The term Global Change is commonly employed to refer to such environmental changes. Earth ecosystems with three common characteristics: (1) changes of human origin; (2) an exponential growth rate over time; and (3) a global scale manifestation [2]. Factors such as habitat change, overexploitation of natural resources, invasive species introduction, pollution and climate change have been recognized as major global change drivers [3]. Earth’s surface) and land-use (human purpose applied to these attributes) changes are among the most important drivers of the Earth’s global change [4,5], and significantly affect key aspects of Earth. Land-use/land-cover changes have been identified as the factor with the largest effect on terrestrial ecosystems than any other driver of global change [7]
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