An innovative index for separating the effects of temperature and precipitation on global vegetation change

Abstract

Temperature and precipitation changes are among the vital climatic driving forces of global vegetation change. However, the strategy to separate the relative contributions of these two critical climatic factors is still lacking. Here, we propose an index CRTP (contribution ratio of temperature and precipitation) to quantify their impacts on vegetation and then construct the CRTP classification prediction models based on climatic, geographic, and environmental factors using the Random Forest classifier. We find that precipitation predominates more than 70% of the significant vegetation change, mainly located in the low and middle latitudes during 2000-2021. Precipitation will remain the dominant climatic factor affecting global vegetation change in the coming six decades, whereas areas with temperature-dominated vegetation change will expand under higher radiative forcings. Hopefully, the promising index CRTP will be applied in the research about climatic attribution for regional vegetation degradation, monitoring drought-type conversion, and alarming the potential ecological risk.