Abstract
Vegetation dynamics are an important topic in the field of global environment change, which is of great significance to monitor temporal–spatial variability of desertification at regional or global scales. Following the reported desertification reversion in the late 1990s in the Horqin Sandy Land, an issue was concerned for desertification control by decreased water availability. To detect the desertification process, MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) sequences were investigated to analyze the effect on vegetation over the 2000–2015 growing season. Results showed that: (1) NDVI sequences exhibited a positive trend in most of the significant pixels (19.1%–44.7% of the total), particularly in the southeastern part of Horqin, while showing a negative trend of 2.2%–4.3%; (2) NDVI was weakly related to precipitation since 2000, because intensified anthropogenic activities have obscured the impacts of climate variables, with a rapid decrease in grassland, and increase in cropland and woodland; and (3) the improved NDVI was interpreted by expanding cropland and excessive groundwater irrigation, according to the positive effect of grain yield on NDVI all over the Horqin area. For persistent desertification reversion, a land use strategy should be more adaptive to the carrying capacity in this agro-pastoral transitional zone, particularly with respect to water capacity.
Highlights
Desertification is one of the major environmental issues, and seriously threatens water-constrained habitat covering 40% of the global land surface [1,2,3]
The United Nations Rio+20 have developed concrete sustainable development goals (SDGs) for worldwide prevention of desertification, as the Target 3 of Goal 15 mentions: “By 2020, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land-degradation-neutral world” [4]
As an effect of the phenological phase, variation of monthly Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) usually presents a unimodal curve within a year [50,51]
Summary
Desertification is one of the major environmental issues, and seriously threatens water-constrained habitat covering 40% of the global land surface [1,2,3]. The United Nations Rio+20 have developed concrete sustainable development goals (SDGs) for worldwide prevention of desertification, as the Target 3 of Goal 15 mentions: “By 2020, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land-degradation-neutral world” [4]. Vegetation dynamics are an important aspect of the desertification process. It is controlled latitudinally and elevationally by global environmental change [5,6], or nutrient availability and rainfall seasonality at regional scales [7]. It is of great significance to detect the complex process in perspectives of sustainable development
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