Abstract
Droughts are recurrent in southwest China due to the fragility and sensitivity of the karst environment. These events have serious impacts on local agricultural output, ecological diversity, and social stability. Understanding spatiotemporal variations and driving factors of drought in this area is of extreme importance for effective mitigation measures. The karst areas situated in southwest China were spatially divided into seven sub-regions according to the topography and degree of karst development. Drought indices, including vegetation condition index (VCI), temperature condition index (TCI), vegetation health index (VHI), normalized vegetation water supply index (NVSWI), and temperature vegetation drought index (TVDI), were calculated from MODIS data during 2000 and 2018 for each sub-region, and drought patterns were examined. The results show that droughts were found to be concentrated in sub-regions such as karst basin, karst plateau, karst gorge, and karst depression areas. Furthermore, there were more drought conditions in karst areas than in non-karst areas. In addition, improvements to drought situation in the study period are significant (p<0.05), and mitigation areas respectively account for 80.1% (NVSWI), 74.2% (VCI), 74.2% (VHI), 30.1% (TCI) and 33.2% (TVDI) of the study area, while drought expands slightly (<3.4%) in areas undergoing urban construction. Pearson’s correlation coefficients between drought indices and temperature are generally above 0.5 in all sub-regions. However, the correlation coefficients between drought indices and precipitation mostly fall within the range of 0.3–0.4, indicating a weaker correlation. Our explanation for the spatiotemporal patterns of drought is that karst phenomena are the natural basis of drought and agricultural production is one of important driving forces. Positive changes of drought conditions have benefited from efforts to control rocky desertification and restore ecosystems over the past years.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank NASA for providing the LST and NDVI data, as well as to the China Meteorological Data Center and China National Earth System Science Data Center for the meteorological data. We are also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers and editors whose comments and suggestions improved this manuscript. This work was supported by the Guangxi Natural Science Foundation (NO. 2022GXNSFBA035639), the Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 42064003), and the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Spatial Information and Geomatics Program (GuiKeNeng 19-050-11-23).
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LU Xian-jian: conceptualization, writing-original draft, writing-review & editing, investigation, supervision; LI Zhen-bao: data curation, software, writing-original draft, investigation, visualization, formal analysis; YAN Hong-bo: conceptualization, design, funding acquisition, methodology; LIANG Yue-ji: data curation, validation, visualization.
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Lu, Xj., Li, Zb., Yan, Hb. et al. Spatiotemporal variations of drought and driving factors based on multiple remote sensing drought indices: A case study in karst areas of southwest China. J. Mt. Sci. 20, 3215–3232 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-023-7927-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-023-7927-7