Dynamic changes of vegetation coverage in China-Myanmar economic corridor over the past 20 years

Abstract

The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) is a flagship project of the “Belt and Road” Initiative (BRI), which have made a major breakthrough from conceptual planning to actual construction in 2020, and subsequent construction activities will have a definite impact on local vegetation. To provide scientific support for vegetation conservation and sustainable development of the CMEC, statistical methods such as Morlet wavelet analysis, Mann-Kendall mutation test, Sen's slope estimator, Mann-Kendall trend test, and coefficient of variation were adopted to analyze the spatio-temporal changes in vegetation coverage; Hurst analysis was adopted to further predicted likely future development trends. The results suggested that: (1) The CMEC experienced an overall increasing Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) at a rate of 0.21%/yr from 2000 to 2019; 2005 was the mutation year when FVC changed from a slow increase to a significant increase. The FVC changes was mainly controlled by a 12-month oscillation period. The seasonal average FVC increase was slightly different, which were ranked in descending order, as winter (0.29%) > autumn (0.17%) > summer (0.14%) = spring (0.14%). The increasing trend in autumn and winter exceeded those in spring and summer, particularly after 2018. (2) The area with an increasing trend in FVC was five times of those with a decreasing trend (~49.40% VS ~ 9.97%). The former was mainly clustered in the Dehong Dai and Jingpo, China, central and southern part of sub-region Myanmar; whereas the latter primarily distributed in main urban zones such as Mangshi, Ruili, Mandalay, and Yangon. Above areas where FVC changes significantly were affected by human activities such as afforestation, agriculture and construction, and the fluctuation of FVC changes was strong in the short term. (3) Future changes in FVC indicated that ~ 88.08% of the CMEC will show a stable and positive trend, mainly agglomerated in forest and farmland zones. However, it is expected that vegetation coverage in main urban zones and several unused land zones formed by farmland degradation will experience further decrease, and the conservation of vegetation in these regions should be a focus during the construction of the CMEC.