Abstract
Grasslands play an irreplaceable role in maintaining carbon balance and stabilizing the entire Earth’s ecosystem. Although the grasslands in Inner Mongolia are sensitive and vulnerable to climate change, a generalized effect of climate change on the grasslands is still unavailable. In this study, we analyzed the effects of annual mean precipitation and annual mean temperature on the normalized difference vegetation index from 1982 to 2010 on the Inner Mongolia Plateau. Our results indicated that the normalized difference vegetation index was mostly affected by precipitation, followed by temperature. Spatially, temperature and precipitation had greater effects on normalized difference vegetation index in dry regions than in wet ones. In time series, the effect of precipitation on normalized difference vegetation index had significantly decreased from 1982 to 2010 (R2 = 0.11, p > 0.05). However, the effect of temperature on normalized difference vegetation index remained stable. The high variation effect of precipitation on normalized difference vegetation index was due to the significant decrease in precipitation from 1980 to 2010. Thus, 35.47% and 0.56% of the dynamic of normalized difference vegetation index from 1982 to 2010 was accounted for by the precipitation and temperature, respectively. Our findings highlighted that grasslands are adaptable to the significant increase in temperature, but are sensitive to the decrease in precipitation on the Inner Mongolia Plateau.
Highlights
The global ecological environment is under a serious threat, such as loss of soil productivity due to global warming [1]
Our findings highlighted that grasslands are adaptable to the significant increase in temperature, but are sensitive to the decrease in precipitation on the Inner Mongolia Plateau
The northeast part of Inner Mongolia is semi-humid, with annual precipitation of more than 500 mm [27], which is mainly affected by the East Asian monsoon [21]; a high normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) value in the northeast of Inner Mongolia was observed
Summary
The global ecological environment is under a serious threat, such as loss of soil productivity due to global warming [1]. The relationship between vegetation and climate change is a hot point in global change studies because vegetation is an important component of the global terrestrial ecosystem [2]. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) can reflect the growth information of surface vegetation by remote sensing monitoring [7], which is calculated by the sum of the difference between the reflection value of the near-infrared band and the red band [1]. NDVI is considered to be one of the best indicators for monitoring land vegetation cover and it has been widely used in the study of large-scale vegetation change [8]. The peak NDVI value reflects synthetically the photosynthetic activity of plants under current environmental conditions [9,10]
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