Land surface phenology from VEGETATION and PROBA-V data. Assessment over deciduous forests

Abstract

Land surface phenology has been widely retrieved although no consensus exists on the optimal satellite dataset and the method to extract phenology metrics. This study is the first comprehensive comparison of vegetation variables and methods to retrieve land surface phenology for 1999–2017 time series of Copernicus Global Land products derived from SPOT-VEGETATION and PROBA-V data. We investigated the sensitivity of phenology to (I) the input vegetation variable: normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), leaf area index (LAI), fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR), and fraction of vegetation cover (FCOVER); (II) the smoothing and gap filling method for deriving seasonal trajectories; and (III) the method to extract phenological metrics: thresholds based on a percentile of the annual amplitude of the vegetation variable, autoregressive moving averages, logistic function fitting, and first derivative methods. We validated the derived satellite phenological metrics (start of the season (SoS) and end of the season (EoS)) using available ground observations of Betula pendula, B. alleghaniensis, Acer rubrum, Fagus grandifolia, and Quercus rubra in Europe (Pan-European PEP725 network) and the USA (National Phenology Network, USA-NPN). The threshold-based method applied to the smoothed and gap-filled LAI V2 time series agreed best with the ground phenology, with root mean square errors of ˜10 d and ˜25 d for the timing of SoS and EoS respectively. This research is expected to contribute for the operational retrieval of land surface phenology within the Copernicus Global Land Service.