**5. Conclusions**

This study used the phenology metrics of vegetation in the QMs extracted from satellite NDVI data to analyze the spatiotemporal trends of LSP during 2001–2019, and to identify the dominant growth patterns of different vegetation types during the growing season. Furthermore, driving factors influencing interannual variations in LSP were emphatically investigated using the RF model. The main conclusions were as follows:


**Supplementary Materials:** The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4 292/13/22/4538/s1, Figure S1: The primary factor (SOS or EOS) controlling change in LOS across the entire study area calculated by the C-index, Figure S2: Red fitting curves between predicted LSP dates from RF model and observed LSP dates from MODIS13A2-NDVI, Table S1: The relative importance of each driver affecting interannual variation in LSP, Table S2: Correlation results of random forest models built for different vegetation type cover areas.

**Author Contributions:** J.G.: Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing—original draft. X.L.: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing—original draft. W.G.: Data curation, Visualization. X.N.: Data curation, Visualization. W.M.: Writing—review & editing. Q.L.: Writing—review & editing. X.X.: Resources. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 41971104) and partially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Projects GK202107009 and 2021TS015).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable. **Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

**Acknowledgments:** I am very grateful to the reviewers and editors for their suggestions on the revision of the manuscript.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
