A challenge in phenology studies is understanding what constitutes significant phenological change amidst background variation (e.g. noise) and ecosystem disturbances (e.g. fires). The majority of phenological studies have focussed on extracting critical points in the seasonal growth cycle (e.g. Start-of-spring), without exploiting the full temporal detail. Moreover, the high degree of phenological variability between years demonstrates the necessity of distinguishing long term phenological change from temporal variability. Here, we evaluate the phenological change detection ability of a …