A Multi-Perspective Assessment Method with a Dynamic Benchmark for Human Activity Impacts on Alpine Ecosystem under Climate Change

Fuguang Zhang,Ying Cao,Taibao Yang,Yuxuan Zheng,Biao Zeng

doi:10.3390/rs14010208

Abstract

Intense human activities and rapid climate changes both have obvious impacts on alpine ecosystems. However, the magnitudes and directions of the impacts by these two drivers remain uncertain due to a lack of a reasonable assessment method to distinguish between them. The impact of natural resilience is also generally included in the dynamics of a disturbed ecosystem and is liable to be mixed into the impact of human activity. It is urgent that we quantitatively discriminate human activity impacts on the ecosystem under climate change, especially for fast-developing alpine regions. Here, we propose an assessment method to determine human activity impacts under a dynamic climate, taking the potential net primary production (NPP) of an ecosystem as a benchmark. The potential NPP (NPPP) series under the changing climate was retrieved by an improved integrated biosphere simulator based on the initial disturbed ecosystem status of the assessment period. The actual NPP (NPPA) series monitored by remote sensing was considered as the results derived from the joint impacts of climate change, natural resilience and human activity. Then, the impact of human activity was quantified as the difference between the NPPP and NPPA. The contributions of human activity and natural forces to ecosystem NPP dynamics were then calculated separately and employed to explore the dominant driver(s). This assessment method was demonstrated in a typical alpine ecosystem in Northwest China. The results indicate that this method capably revealed the positive impacts of local afforestation and land-use optimization and the negative impacts caused by grazing during the assessment period of 2001–2017. This assessment method provides a quantitative reference for assessing the performances of ecological protections or human damage to alpine ecosystems at the regional scale.

Highlights

Intense human activity and rapid climate change have significantly affected natural terrestrial ecosystems [1,2,3,4], especially alpine ecosystems, which are widely distributed in high-altitude mountainous areas [5,6,7]
We propose a multi-perspective method for the assessment of the impacts of human activity on the alpine ecosystem under the current dynamic climate, using net primary productivity (NPP) as an indicator
The negative impacts of human activity were mainly distributed in the rangelands in the Huzhu Tu Autonomous County (HZ) (Figure 5c,d)

Summary

Introduction

Intense human activity and rapid climate change have significantly affected natural terrestrial ecosystems [1,2,3,4], especially alpine ecosystems, which are widely distributed in high-altitude mountainous areas [5,6,7]. The vegetation composition of the ecosystem mainly involves alpine meadows, forests and grasslands. Vegetation expansion to higher altitudes in alpine areas has been recognized [8,9], with such changes in vegetation pattern and ecosystem services directly impacting socio-economic development downstream of alpine areas [10,11,12]. Concurrent greening in recent decades is evident from remotely sensed data [13,14,15], including within arid and semi-arid areas [12,16,17], though debate remains regarding the sustainability of afforestation with respect to water resource limits [18,19,20,21].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion