Continued spring phenological advance under global warming hiatus over the Pan-Third Pole

Zhengjie Yan; Jinfeng Xu; Xiaoyi Wang; Zhiyong Yang; Dan Liu; Guoshuai Li; Huabing Huang

doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.1071858

Continued spring phenological advance under global warming hiatus over the Pan-Third Pole

Front Plant Sci. 2022 Nov 24:13:1071858. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2022.1071858. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Zhengjie Yan^{1

2

3}, Jinfeng Xu^{1

2

3}, Xiaoyi Wang³, Zhiyong Yang³, Dan Liu³, Guoshuai Li⁴, Huabing Huang^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ College of Ecology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.
² Center for the Pan-Third Pole Environment, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Environment and Resources (TPESER), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁴ Heihe Remote Sensing Experimental Research Station, Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing of Gansu Province, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China.
⁵ School of Geospatial Engineering and Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
⁶ Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China.

Abstract

The global surface temperature has witnessed a warming hiatus in the first decade of this century, but how this slowing down of warming will impact spring phenology over Pan-Third Pole remains unclear. Here, we combined multiple satellite-derived vegetation indices with eddy covariance datasets to evaluate the spatiotemporal changes in spring phenological changes over the Pan-Third Pole. We found that the spring phenology over Pan-Third Pole continues to advance at the rate of 4.8 days decade^-1 during the warming hiatus period, which is contrasted to a non-significant change over the northern hemisphere. Such a significant and continued advance in spring phenology was mainly attributed to an increase in preseason minimum temperature and water availability. Moreover, there is an overall increasing importance of precipitation on changes in spring phenology during the last four decades. We further demonstrated that this increasingly negative correlation was also found across more than two-thirds of the dryland region, tentatively suggesting that spring phenological changes might shift from temperature to precipitation-controlled over the Pan-Third Pole in a warmer world.

Keywords: alpine vegetation; asymmetric warming; spring phenology; warming hiatus; water availability.