Accelerated vegetative growth measured by gross primary productivity in China from 1980 to 2018

Abstract

Vegetation response to climate change can be characterized as long-term trends, but with periodic oscillations. Revealing vegetation response trends, with oscillations, is essential for formulating climate change mitigation and adaptation planning, as well as adopting ecological protection and restoration measures. Here, the long-term trend and periodic oscillations in vegetation changes were explored through a measure of gross primary production (GPP), an indicator of vegetation photosynthesis, using data of both high spatial resolution (1 km2) and a long-term of nearly 4 decades, from 1980 to 2018. The GPP data were estimated for China’s terrestrial ecosystem and validated against the eddy covariance-based observations of 70 site-year in China and compared to other GPP data products. The results showed the estimated GPP can explain 76% of spatial–temporal variance with the same data accuracy as other products, but with the advantage of both high spatial resolution and long time periods that other products do not have. From the estimated GPP data, Chinese terrestrial vegetation growth was found to have a periodic oscillation of close to 2.79 years and a long-term increasing trend of 59.8 Mt C per year over 92% of all vegetated land in China from 1980 to 2018. Moreover, it was found that vegetation growth accelerated significantly in the two recent decades over the previous two decades. The growth rate was 83.5 Mt C a−1 from 2000 to 2018, which was 2.31 times faster than the rate from 1980 to 2000. The underlying mechanism of the vegetation responses was analyzed by ridge regression, a method to decrease the effects of multicollinearity. Long-term variability and trends in vegetation could be attributed to a warming minimum air temperature when examined with precipitation, maximum air temperature, and solar shortwave radiation. Though more influences, such as those from freezing and thawing and human activities, should be explored in the future, this study offers insight that warming, with increasing daily minimum temperatures, is likely to be a vital contributor to ecosystem changes, and will be essential knowledge for mitigation of effects and adaptation to future climate.