Abstract
Vegetation is an indicator of changes in the ecological environment and a key source of feedback on the impact of drought. In this work we selected northern China as the study area and used the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to assess the relationship between drought and vegetation dynamics at annual and seasonal scales for the period 1982–2015. The results indicated that annual drought showed a slight increase in northern China during this time, and it was mainly attributed to the intensified summer drought; the percentages of areas where significant drying, drying, wetting, and significant wetting occurred accounted for 3.30%, 53.36%, 40.39%, and 2.95%, respectively. Annual NDVI showed a highly significant (p < 0.01) upward trend in northern China, suggesting that vegetation there is greening. However, there was still a significant decrease in the NDVI trend in 13.65% of the study area, and forest accounted for the greatest area among the three land cover types studied. A positive correlation between annual SPEI and annual NDVI was found in most of northern China, and 18.66% of the study area (p < 0.05) were mainly distributed in the central-eastern part of Inner Mongolia, the central part of the Loess Plateau, and northwestern part of Xinjiang Province. Residual analysis found that the percentages of vegetation dynamics affected by human-induced degradation, human-induced improvement, and drought accounted for 13.91%, 47.91%, and 38.18%, respectively; however, 54.15% of the areas affected by drought were located in arid and semi-arid regions and that about 54.61% of those were grassland. The work could provide guidance for vegetation construction and water resource management in northern China.
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Data availability
The NDVI3g dataset was downloaded from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) observation instruments by the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) group (http://ecocast.arc.nasa.gov). The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) dataset (SPEI base v2.5) was obtained from the SPEI library (http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/153475). The land cover data was extracted from the Global Land Cover 2000 database (https://forobs.jrc. ec.europa.eu/products/glc2000/products.php).
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Not applicable.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.
Funding
This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers: 41807503), the Scientific Research Project of Education Department of Shaanxi Provincial Government (21JK0771), and the Start-up Fund Project of Xi’an University of Science and Technology (Grant number: 2017QDJ030).
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Conceptualization, methodology, and writing: Guangpo Geng. Data analysis and editing: Hongkui Zhou and Tao Wang. All authors contributed to the drafting and revision of the manuscript.
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Geng, G., Zhou, H. & Wang, T. Assessing the relationship between drought and vegetation dynamics in northern China during 1982–2015. Theor Appl Climatol 148, 467–479 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-03956-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-03956-2