Past and future influence of climate change on spatially heterogeneous vegetation activity in China

Abstract

Abstract. Climate change is a major driver of vegetation activity, and thus their complex relationships become a frontier and 10 difficulty in global change research. In this paper, the spatial distribution and dynamic variation of climate change impacts on vegetation activity from 1980s to 2050 in China were investigated by the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model, based on the combined datasets of satellite vegetation index, climate observation and projection, and future vegetation productivity simulation. Our results noted that the significant positive precipitation-vegetation relationship was and will be almost distributed in the north of China, except the northeast and northwest China with significant but varying 15 influence of temperature rising, while the regions with temperature dominated vegetation activity mainly located in the southern part of China. There will be different climatic dominators for vegetation activity in some regions such as northwest China, and even opposite correlation in the northeast China, and further the responding patterns of vegetation activity to precipitation variation will be moving southward in the future three decades. It is indicated that although high warming rate will restrain the vegetation activity, precipitation variability can mediate the hydrothermal conditions for vegetation activity, 20 for example the enhanced vegetation activity in the Tibetan Plateau and the weakened vegetation activity in the East and Middle China in the future. Furthermore, coupling the responding patterns and the dynamic variation, it can be found that during the period from 2021 to 2050, vegetation in most of north China may adapt to an arid environment, while in many southern parts it will be repressed due to water shortage. However, the continuous and dynamic responding process of vegetation activity to climate change will be determined by the spatial heterogeneity in climate change and vegetation cover. 25

Identifying Critical Meteorological Elements for Vegetation Coverage Change in China

“…In the humid area of southern China, vegetation growth is susceptible to TEM. A similar result was also obtained in climate-vegetation studies [23].…”

“…The scale has always been a research hot spot in the field of ecology [1]. In recent years, most scholars have been carrying out the influence of climate change on vegetation in different temporal and spatial scales based on remote sensing data [21][22][23][24][25]. On the global scale, it is proposed that the growing season vegetation change in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere is governed by temperature, the arid and semi-arid areas are dominated by precipitation, and Amazon and South and East Asia are dominated by solar radiation [16,17].…”

“…Zhou et al [27] analyzed the relationship between climate variability and NDVI in eastern China through correlation analysis, which showed that the NDVI in the arid area was negatively correlated with temperature and positively correlated with precipitation. The dominant factor of vegetation change is the temperature in southern China [23].…”

Assessing vegetation response to multi-time-scale drought across inner Mongolia plateau

“…The GIMMS NDVI3g dataset (https://nex.nasa.gov/nex/projects/1349/) were used in this study since it is well known as high quality (Gao et al, 2017) and also widely used to identifying longest time period of trends in vegetation activity (Xu et al 2014). These dataset is at a spatial resolution of 8 km and a 15-day temporal interval for the period from January 1982 to December 2015.…”

Vegetation Dynamics and Diverse Responses to Extreme Climate Events in Different Vegetation Types of Inner Mongolia

“…The GIMMS NDVI3g datasets were used in this study, because they have high quality and are used to research long-term vegetation trends [28,29]. The spatial resolution of the dataset is 0.083 degrees with a 15-day temporal interval.…”