Spatial sampling inconsistency leads to differences in phenological sensitivity to warming between natural and experiment sites.

Highlights from the article: Plant spring phenology is receiving increasing attention owing to the recognition of its high sensitivity to ongoing climatic warming [1]. Piao et al. [14] found that spring phenology was triggered more by daytime temperature than by nighttime or daily average temperature, but the spring carbon uptake was weakened with the increase of temperature [15]. Considering difference among methods in determining spring phenology, we retrieved spring phenology using five different approaches [5], including Gauss, Spline, HANTS, Polyfit, and Timesat (see Ref. [5] for details).