Abstract
Due to 4000 m elevation variation with temperature differences equivalent to 50 degrees of latitudinal gradient, exploring Taiwan’s spatial vegetation trends is valuable in terms of diverse ecosystems and climatic types covering a relatively small island with an area of 36,000 km2. This study analyzed Taiwan’s spatial vegetation trends with controlling environmental variables through redundancy (RDA) and hierarchical cluster (HCA) analyses over three decades (1982–2012) of monthly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) NDVI3g data for 19 selected weather stations over the island. Results showed two spatially distinct vegetation response groups. Group 1 comprises weather stations which remained relatively natural showing a slight increasing NDVI tendency accompanied with rising temperature, whereas Group 2 comprises stations with high level of human development showing a slight decreasing NDVI tendency associated with increasing temperature-induced moisture stress. Statistically significant controlling variables include climatic factors (temperature and precipitation), orographic factors (mean slope and aspects), and anthropogenic factor (population density). Given the potential trajectories for future warming, variable precipitation, and population pressure, challenges, such as land-cover and water-induced vegetation stress, need to be considered simultaneously for establishing adequate adaptation strategies to combat climate change challenges in Taiwan.
Highlights
IntroductionThe terrestrial ecosystem is subject to the unprecedented speed of global climate change and must be carefully monitored because of its central role in maintaining a healthy and sustainable planet.Because of the close relationship between vegetation phenology and the terrestrial ecosystem [1,2,3], vegetation is commonly used to determine the ecological response to environmental changes [4,5,6,7], such as climate change [8,9,10,11], land cover and land use change [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19], drought [20,21], and changes in net primary productivity [22]
normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) satellite series are widely used and have been considered as the best dataset available for long-term analysis of vegetation dynamics at reasonable spatial and temporal scales [30]
The positively significant correlation (p < 0.05) between elevation and the mean slope reflected the mountainous terrain of Taiwan
Summary
The terrestrial ecosystem is subject to the unprecedented speed of global climate change and must be carefully monitored because of its central role in maintaining a healthy and sustainable planet.Because of the close relationship between vegetation phenology and the terrestrial ecosystem [1,2,3], vegetation is commonly used to determine the ecological response to environmental changes [4,5,6,7], such as climate change [8,9,10,11], land cover and land use change [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19], drought [20,21], and changes in net primary productivity [22]. Satellite remote sensing vegetation indices offer opportunities to monitor vegetation phenology and environmental changes in a repeatable manner [22]. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is one of the most widely accepted vegetation indices based on a mechanism that chlorophyll in vegetation absorbs more strongly in the red light spectrum (RED). NDVI data derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) satellite series are widely used and have been considered as the best dataset available for long-term analysis of vegetation dynamics at reasonable spatial and temporal scales [30]. A number of studies investigating changes in AVHRR NDVI data found that regional climate variability differentially regulated vegetation phenology across different ecosystems at various spatial scales [31,32,33,34,35]. Yu et al (2003) [36] revealed that the response of vegetation photosynthetic activities to climate variations depends on season while other studies showed that climate warming is asymmetric among different seasons and continents [37,38]
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