Anthropogenic Climate Change Negatively Impacts Vegetation and Forage Conditions in the Greater Four Corners Region

Abstract

AbstractThe Southwestern U.S. has been in a megadrought for the past two decades, stressing vegetation across the region and leading to poor forage conditions on rangelands. How has human‐induced climate change affected air temperatures and atmospheric evaporative demand in the greater Four Corners region of the Southwest, and what have the corresponding impacts been to vegetative productivity? We address this question via a multi‐step climate change detection and attribution analysis. We first relate evaporative demand (quantified by Vapor Pressure Deficit, or VPD) and precipitation to the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in six unique plant‐precipitation zones. VPD is strongly negatively related to NDVI, and the strength of this relation is similar in magnitude to precipitation. We then use a large ensemble of climate change simulations to estimate the magnitude of VPD increases attributable to human‐induced climate change. We find that modest increases in air temperatures have led to large increases in VPD, with the influence of climate change about twice the inter‐annual standard deviation by 2020. Finally, we estimate the reductions in NDVI due to increased VPD and present the reductions in terms of total annual Aboveground Net Primary Productivity. We conclude that human‐induced warming has roughly doubled the magnitude of recent vegetation deficits, especially in mid‐precipitation areas (receiving 250–500 mm of precipitation annually), concentrated in New Mexico. These results indicate that increased temperatures from human‐caused climate change are having persistent and damaging impacts on vegetation productivity, with significant implications for ranchers and other land users in the region.