Abstract
The oasis-desert ecotone as a transitional zone is sensitive and vulnerable to hydro-climatic changes and anthropogenic activities in maintaining oasis stability and combating desertification. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is an important indicator for evaluating the desert vegetation restoration status. However, it is difficult to quantify individual and interactive impacts of hydro-climatic changes and anthropogenic activities on NDVI in the oasis-desert ecotone. This paper introduces the hydro-climate elasticity and geographical detector approach to assess the influences of hydro-climate changes and human activities on NDVI in Qira oasis-desert ecotone, Northwest China during 2000–2019. Results show that the climatic elasticities of NDVI reflect that the NDVI is more sensitive to precipitation (0.318) than to temperature (0.290), while the NDVI becomes more sensitive to variation in soil moisture content (0.219) than that in the groundwater table (0.150) in hydrological elasticities. The land-use change caused by human activities results in a decrease of NDVI, accounting for 90% of NDVI reduction. The human activities indicate the strongest influence on NDVI. The nonparametric elasticity estimator proposed is illustrated good agreement with the spatiotemporal synchronism of NDVI to hydro-climatic changes. The interaction analysis of geographical detector reveals that the interaction among influencing factors has a bivariate enhancement relationship and a nonlinear enhancement effect on NDVI. This study contributes to clarifying the individual influencing and interactive relationships of NDVI to hydro-climatic factors and human activities, and assist land restoration practitioners to evaluate the desert vegetation restoration status under current and future hydro-climatic changes in arid regions.
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The datasets used for this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (2021D01E01), the original innovation project of the basic frontier scientific research program, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ZDBS-LY-DQC031), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42071259), the Young Talent Growth Fund Project of Northwest Institute of Ecological Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences (FEYS2019016), the Third Batch of Tianshan Talents Program of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (2021-2023), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019430). We are also grateful to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments in this manuscript.
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This study was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (2021D01E01), the original innovation project of the basic frontier scientific research program, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ZDBS-LY-DQC031), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42071259), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019430).
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JC, LG, FZ, GM, JX conceived and designed the research; YC, DM collected the data; JC, YC, SW analyzed the data; JC, FZ, JX wrote and edited the manuscript.
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Chang, J., Gong, L., Zeng, F. et al. Using hydro-climate elasticity estimator and geographical detector method to quantify the individual and interactive impacts on NDVI in oasis-desert ecotone. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 36, 3131–3148 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-022-02184-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-022-02184-4