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Monitoring vegetation change and their potential drivers in Yangtze River Basin of China from 1982 to 2015

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Abstract

Monitoring vegetation change and their potential drivers are important to environmental management. Previous studies on vegetation change detection and driver discrimination were two independent fields. Specifically, change detection methods focus on nonlinear and linear change behaviors, i.e., abrupt change (AC) and gradual change (GC). But driver discrimination studies mainly used linear coupling models which rarely concerned the nonlinear behaviors of vegetation. The two diagnoses need be treated as sequential flow because they have inner causality mechanisms. Furthermore, ACs concealed in time series may induce over/under-estimate contributions from human. We chose the Yangtze River Basin of China (YRB) as a study area, first separated ACs from GCs using breaks for additive and seasonal trend method, then discriminated drivers of GCs using optimized Restrend method. Results showed that (1) 2.83% of YRB were ACs with hotspots in 1998 (30.2%), 2003 (10.4%), and 2002 (7.6%); 66.7% of YRB experienced GC with 94.8% of which were positive; and (2) climate induced more area but less dramatic GCs than human activities. Further analysis showed that temperature was the main climate driver to GCs, while human-induced GCs were related to local eco-policies. The widely occurring ACs in 1998 were related to the flooding catastrophe, while the dramatic ACs in sub-basin 12 in 2003 may result from urbanization. This paper provides clear insights on the vegetation changes and their drivers at a relatively long perspective (i.e., 34 years). Sequential combination of specifying different vegetation behaviors with driver analysis could improve driver characterizations, which is key to environmental assessment and management in YRB.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to Yumeng Yang for her assistance with data collection. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and comments.

Funding

This study was funded by China Scholarship Council, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41701474 and 41701467), the National Key Research and Development Plan of China (grant no. 2016YFC0500205), the National Basic Research Program of China (grant no. 2015CB954103).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Geographical Process Analysis & Simulation of Hubei Province, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Lili Xu, Guangming Yu, Zhenfa Tu & Yucui Zhang

  2. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Lili Xu, Guangming Yu, Zhenfa Tu & Yucui Zhang

  3. Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University & Research, Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Nandin-Erdene Tsendbazar

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  1. Lili Xu
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Xu, L., Yu, G., Tu, Z. et al. Monitoring vegetation change and their potential drivers in Yangtze River Basin of China from 1982 to 2015. Environ Monit Assess 192, 642 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-020-08595-6

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