Reza Jafari; Morteza Ansari; Mostafa Tarkesh
Abstract
Temperature is the most important parameter for studying spatiotemporal phenological changes in plants. Thus, the current study was aimed to investigate the potential of MODIS land surface temperature (LST) data for mapping growing degree days (GDD) and different phenological stages of Bromus tomentllus ...
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Temperature is the most important parameter for studying spatiotemporal phenological changes in plants. Thus, the current study was aimed to investigate the potential of MODIS land surface temperature (LST) data for mapping growing degree days (GDD) and different phenological stages of Bromus tomentllus and Astragalus effusus in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province. MODIS extracted maps of maximum, minimum and mean temperature, GDD index and phenological stages from 2018 to 2019 during growing season were assessed against weather station data and also field-based phenilogical data using Pearson analysis in three regions with different altitudes. Results showed that MODIS LST and GDD maps had more than 91 and 99% correlations with field-based air temperature and GDD data, respectively (p<0.001). In early growing season, GDD values were less than 16 degree-days and they were more than 5200 degree-days in the late growing season which explained one and all the phenological stages of the studied species in the study area, respectively. The study findings indicated that MODIS data have high capability in spatiotemporal stratification of phenological stages of the Bromus tomentllus and Astragalus effuses plant species. The knowledge of different phenological stages is essential in species conservation and rangeland sustainable utilization, therefore, species phenology map can be used as an effective tool in rangeland management in the related organizations.
