| Phenology has become an area of major interest as the spatio-temporal dynamics of cyclic events have potentially broad impacts on both terrestrial ecosystems and human society. However, existing phenology studies are usually performed under normal meteorological conditions and ignore the influence of disturbance events. Vegetation may respond differently towards disturbance events and this motivated this work. The goal of this research is to utilize a current geophysical process (e.g., volcanic activity) to examine the effect of environmental change on vegetation onset/ offset using MODIS dataset from years 2001 to 2013. The results indicate that the inter-annual variability in phenology timing can be either advanced or delayed by climatic factors. For most of the sites, the onset/offset event can be well explained by the combination of temperature and precipitation using linear regression, as indicated by standardized and regular coefficients, respectively. |
