Vegetation phenology and its ecohydrological implications from individual to global scales

Abstract

The Earth is experiencing unprecedented climate change. Vegetation phenology has already showed strong response to the global warming, which alters mass and energy fluxes on terrestrial ecosystems. With technology and method developments in remote sensing, computer science and citizen science, many recent phenology-related studies have been focused on macrophenology. In this perspective, we 1) reviewed the responses of vegetation phenology to climate change and its impacts on carbon cycling, and reported that the effect of shifted phenology on the terrestrial carbon fluxes is substantially different between spring and autumn; 2) elaborated how vegetation phenology affects ecohydrological processes at different scales, and further listed the key issues for each scale, i.e., focusing on seasonal effect, local feedbacks and regional vapor transport for individual, watershed and global respectively); 3) envisioned the potentials to improve current hydrological models by coupling vegetation phenology-related processes, in combining with machine learning, deep learning and scale transformation methods. We propose that comprehensive understanding of climate-macrophenology-hydrology interactions are essential and urgently needed for enhancing our understanding of the ecosystem response and its role in hydrological cycle under future climate change.

Keywords

• Global warming
• Marcophenology
• Carbon balance
• Ecohydrology