Vegetation change in response to climate factors and human activities on the Mongolian Plateau

Meng Meng; Ni Huang; Mingquan Wu; Jie Pei; Jian Wang; Zheng Niu

doi:10.7717/peerj.7735

Vegetation change in response to climate factors and human activities on the Mongolian Plateau

PeerJ. 2019 Sep 30:7:e7735. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7735. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Meng Meng^{1

2}, Ni Huang¹, Mingquan Wu¹, Jie Pei^{1

2}, Jian Wang^{1

2}, Zheng Niu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ The State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Background: Vegetation in the Mongolian Plateau is very sensitive to climate change, which has a significant impact on the regulation of terrestrial carbon cycle.

Methods: We analyzed spatio-temporal changes of both growing season and the seasonal Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) using simple linear trend analysis. Besides, correlation analysis was applied to explore the climate factors' effects on vegetation growth at temporal and spatial scale. Potential effects of human factors on vegetation growth were also explored by residual trend analysis.

Results: The results indicated that vegetation growth showed a greening trend in the Mongolian Plateau over the past 30 years. At the temporal scale, the growing season NDVI showed an insignificant increasing trend (at a rate of 0.0003 yr^-1). At the spatial scale, a large region (53.8% of the whole Mongolian Plateau) with an increasing growing season NDVI, was primarily located in the southern and northern parts of the plateau. The correlation analysis suggested that temperature and precipitation were the main limiting factors that affected vegetation growth in spring and the growing season, respectively. The residual trend analysis showed that human activities primarily stimulated the growth of grasslands and shrublands, while croplands displayed a decreasing trend due to human disturbances, implying that anthropogenic factors may lead to croplands abandonment in favor of grasslands restoration. Our results provided detailed spatial and temporal changes of vegetation growth, and explored how climate and human factors affected vegetation growth, which may offer baseline data and scientific suggestions for local land and resources management, and facilitate the sustainable development of the terrestrial ecosystems.

Keywords: Climate change; Correlation analysis; GIMMS 3g; Residual trend analysis; The mongolian plateau.

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, grant number (2017YFA0603002) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant number (41771465). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.