Responses of Natural Vegetation Dynamics to Climate Drivers in China from 1982 to 2011

Remote Sensing

Yanlan Liu¹  Huimin Lei¹  Alfredo R. Huete² 

[1] id="af1-remotesensing-07-10243">State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, Chi

关键词: vegetation dynamics;    trend;    abrupt change;    dominant climate driver;    China;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs70810243

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

This study investigated the spatiotemporal variation of vegetation growth and the influence of climatic drivers from 1982 to 2011 across China using datasets from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and climatic drivers. Long term trends, significance and abrupt change points of interannual NDVI time series were analyzed. We applied both simple regression and multi-regression models to quantify the effects of climatic drivers on vegetation growth and compare their relative contributions. Results show that on average, the growing season NDVI significantly increased by 0.0007 year. To be regional specific, the growing season NDVI in forest covered southern China has accelerated together with temperature since mid 1990s, while parts of the grassland in northern China have undergone stalled NDVI trends corresponding to slowed temperature increment and dropped precipitation since around 2000. Typical region analysis suggested that apart from long term trends and abrupt change points of climatic drivers, the processes of NDVI variation were also affected by other external factors such as drought and afforestation. Further studies are needed to investigate the nonlinear responses of vegetation growth to climatic drivers and effects of non-climate factors on vegetation growth.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.