Mapping Phenology of Complicated Wetland Landscapes through Harmonizing Landsat and Sentinel-2 Imagery

Abstract

Wetlands are important CO2 sinks and methane sources, and their seasonality and phenological cycle play an essential role in understanding the carbon budget. However, given the spatial heterogeneity of wetland landscapes and the coarser spatial resolution of satellites, the phenological retrievals of wetlands are challenging. Here we examined the phenology of wetlands from 30 m harmonized Landsat/Sentinel-2 (LandSent30) and 500 m MODIS satellite observations using the ground phenology network PhenoCam as a benchmark. This study used all 11 available wetland PhenoCam sites (about 30 site years), covering diverse wetland types from different climate zones. We found that the LandSent30-based phenology results were in overall higher consistency with the PhenoCam results compared to MODIS, which could be related to the better explanation capacity of LandSent30 data in the heterogeneous landscapes of wetlands. This also means that the LandSent30 has an advantage over the 500 m MODIS regarding wetland vegetation phenological retrievals. It should be noted that the LandSent30 did not show a greatly improved performance, which could be related to the specificity and complexity of the wetlands landscape. We also illustrated the potential effects of the location and observation direction of PhenoCam cameras, the selection of Region of Interest (ROI), as well as the landscape composition of the site. Overall, this study highlights the complexity of wetland phenology from both ground and remote sensing observations at different scales, which paves the road for understanding the role of wetlands in global climate change and provides a basis for understanding the real phenological changes of wetland surfaces.