Exploring vegetation phenology at continental scales: linking temperature-based indices and land surface phenological metrics

Phenology is thes cience that studies the timings of recurring biological events such as leafing and blooming as well as their causes and variations in space and time. Spatially explicit environmental datasets and are key to understand phenological dynamics at continental to global scales. Here we present a novel exploratory analysis where we link temperature based phenological indices and land surface phenological metrics derived from remotely sensed images. Our exploratory analysis, illustrated with two multi-decadal and high-spatial resolution phenological products for continental USA, focuses on identifying phenological regions and on mapping the coherence between phenological products. To cope with the computational challenges of analyzing big geo-datasets, we executed our analysis on a cloud platform running Apache Spark. First results show that weather, climate and landcover variability modulate phenological patterns in contrasting ways, and we believe that our computational solution work paves the path towards the analysis of global vegetation phenology at very high spatial resolution.