Seasonal metrics and anomaly detection based on spot-vegetation archive in Europe

Vegetation phenology, by controlling the seasonal activity of vegetation on the land surface, plays a fundamental role in regulating photosynthesis and other ecosystem processes, as well as competitive interactions and feedbacks to the climate system [1]. Assessing how environmental changes affect the distribution and dynamics of vegetation and animal populations is becoming increasingly important for terrestrial ecologists to enable better predictions of the effects of global warming, biodiversity reduction or habitat degradation[2]. However, despite the existence of long term Earth Observation time series, phenology information is not easily accessible to all scientists. The European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, LifeWatch, provides a set of distributed services to the scientific community in biodiversity research. In this study, we present the development of indices of the vegetation seasonality that are related to ecosystem functioning and animal life traits. These indices aim at describing the average vegetation cycle using a small set of metrics and detecting the anomalies in these cycles in near real-time.