Environmental Drivers of NDVI-Based Vegetation Phenology in Central Asia.docVIP

Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 203-246; doi:10.3390/rs3020203 OPEN ACCESS Remote Sensing ISSN 2072?4292 /journal/remotesensing Article Environmental Drivers of NDVI-Based Vegetation Phenology in Central Asia Jahan Kariyeva 1,* and Willem J.D. van Leeuwen 1,2 1 School of Geography and Development, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA 2 Office of Arid Lands Studies, Arizona Remote Sensing Center, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, 1955 E. Sixth Street, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA; E-Mail: leeuw@ * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: jahank@; Tel.: +1-780-531-4282. Received: 16 November 2010; in revised form: 7 December 2010 / Accepted: 19 January 2011 / Published: 1 February 2011 Abstract: Through the application and use of geospatial data, this study aimed to detect and characterize some of the key environmental drivers contributing to landscape-scale vegetation response patterns in Central Asia. The objectives of the study were to identify the variables driving the year-to-year vegetation dynamics in three regional landscapes (desert, steppe, and mountainous); and to determine if the identified environmental drivers can be used to explain the spatial-temporal variability of these spatio-temporal dynamics over time. It was posed that patterns of change in terrestrial phenology, derived from the 8 km bi-weekly time series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data acquired by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellites (1981–2008), can be explained through a multi-scale analysis of a suite of environmental drivers. Multiple linear stepwise regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses and address the objectives of the study. The annually computed phenological response variables or pheno-metricstime (season start, season length, and an NDVI-based productivity metric)