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Urban vegetation and its carbon storage capacity are critical factors for terrestrial carbon cycling and global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Scientific research for a better managing of urban green land cover is an essential issue of the sustainable urban development initiative promoted by the EU governments. Owing to a crucial role that urban vegetation performs in an urban ecosystem, being effective in mitigating the air pollution and urban heat island effect by canopy shade and evapotranspiration, studying the vegetation dynamics in terms of its derived satellite biogeophysical variables becomes inevitable in the context of climate-smart city planning and design. However, in order to explain the urban-rural gradient in vegetation greenness trends and its responses to climate and antropogenic drivers of land-cover changes this study used time-series of derived satellite data (normalized difference vegetation index-NDVI, enhanced vegetation index- EVI, land surface temperature- LST, leaf area index LAI, and fraction of photosynthetically active radiation absorbed by vegetation- FPAR). Satellite datasets of MODIS Terra, and Landsat TM/ETM+ have been used for urban vegetation analysis over 2002-2022 period of Bucharest metropolitan area in Romania. It was found that the average decrease in vegetation land cover was 0.1 to 0.3. The correlation analyses revealed that, at the pixel-scale, LST possessed a strong positive correlation with NDVI, EVI, FPAR and LAI during the entire investigated period. Only during summer period NDNI/EVI are inversely correlated with LST (r= -0.67; p<0.01) The spatio-temporal pattern of urban/periurban vegetation dynamics trends and their association with other atmospheric, biological, and soil indicators need to be studied with different satellite sensors and resolutions over the long-term periods of time.
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