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Urban/periurban forest, sensitive to climatic factors with different vulnerability thresholds according to the species, amplitude, and rate of climatic stressors plays a critical function in the urban microclimate, mitigating air pollution. Use of urban forest-derived satellite variables is essential for understanding its spatiotemporal changes. To address this issue, we applied time series analysis of MODIS Terra, Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI, and Sentinel-2 data, to assess spatiotemporal changes of the periurban forest Cernica-Branesti system, located in the Eastern part of Bucharest city in Romania, from the perspective of vegetation phenology and its relation with climate changes and extreme climate events during 2002- 2022 period. To evaluate the impacts of climate and anthropogenic stressors on the forest properties, a set of biophysical variables have been estimated and several classifications of forest vegetation over the tested areas have been done. Time series of MODIS satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Land Surface Temperature (LST), Leaf Area Index (LAI), and Evapotranspiration (ET), together in-situ climate variables were analyzed through anomaly detection techniques, and correlations between them were computed. Temperature, rainfall and solar irradiance were significantly correlated with land-cover classes. Annual change detection rates across the investigated forest area over the study period were estimated at 0.82 % per annum in the range of 0.47% (2002) to 0.93% (2022). This study found that vegetation indices NDVI/EVI in Cernica-Branesti periurban forest are inversely correlated with LST during summer season and positively correlated with LST during autumn, winter and spring seasons. Also, NDVI/EVI are positively correlated with LAI and ET during entire investigated period.
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