Abstract
Studying grassland vegetation growing seasons’ spatial patterns and their environmental controls are crucial to promoting vegetation ecological restoration, formulating effective disaster prevention and reduction measures and building a stable ecological barrier. However, multi-grassland phenological factors are different, and this has not been well studied before. In this paper, the spatiotemporal patterns of the start of the growing season (SOS) and the end of growing season (EOS) in the grassland were investigated using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP) from 2000 to 2019. At the same time, we analyzed the environmental factors (including extreme, mean climate, drought, solar radiation, etc.) regulating grassland phenology under the ongoing conditions of climate change. The results show that the SOS appeared first in mountain meadow, shrub tussock, temperature steppe and desert, and then in alpine steppe and alpine meadow, showing a significant advancing tendency in all types. The EOS occurred first in the temperature steppe, alpine steppe and alpine meadow, and then in the mountain meadow, shrub-tussock and desert. Further analysis indicated that reductions in the annual lowest value of daily min temperature (TNN), annual highest value of daily min temperature (TNX) and temperature vegetation dryness index (TVDI), and increases in annual maximum consecutive 5‐day precipitation (RX5day) advanced the grassland spring phenology, whereas the increase in solar radiation (SR) delayed the grassland spring phenology. We also found that the decrease in TVDI and TNN and the increase in yearly mean value of temperature (MAT_MEAN), yearly mean value of daily maximum temperature (MAT_MAX) and yearly mean value of daily minimum temperature (MAT_MIN) advanced the autumn phenology. The EOS and its change rate advanced and increased with increasing altitude, respectively.
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The datasets analyzed during the current study can all be obtained from publicly accessible archives.
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The code generated during the current study is available from the first author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Zhenxia Ji for assisting in data collection. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Funding
This study was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 31760693). National Natural Science Foundation of China,31760693,Jing Wu.
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Gexia Qin contributed to conceptualization, investigation, data curation and writing the original draft. Jing Wu was involved in term, resources, supervision, project administration and funding acquisition. Chunbin Li and Adu Benjamin participated in writing, review and editing.
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Highlights
• Spring and autumn phenology in multi-grassland on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau were analyzed.
• Impacts of environmental factors to multi-grassland phenology were evaluated.
• Extreme temperature and drought events will delay grassland green-up in spring, while solar radiation will lead to an advancement of spring phenology.
• Annual mean temperature and drought events will advance grassland brown in autumn.
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Qin, G., Adu, B., Li, C. et al. Diverse Responses of Phenology in Multi-Grassland to Environmental Factors on Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau in China. Theor Appl Climatol 148, 931–942 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-03963-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-03963-3