Abstract
Quantitative assessment of the contributions of climate change and human activities to vegetation change is important for ecosystem planning and management. To reveal spatial differences in the driving mechanisms of vegetation change in the Qinling Mountains, the changing patterns of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in the Qinling Mountains during 2000–2019 were investigated through trend analysis and multiple regression residuals analysis. The relative contributions of climate change and human activities on vegetation NDVI change were also quantified. The NDVI shows a significant increasing trend (0.23/10a) from 2000 to 2019 in the Qinling Mountains. The percentage of areas with increasing and decreasing trends in NDVI is 87.96% and 12.04% of the study area, respectively. The vegetation change in the Qinling Mountains is caused by a combination of climate change and human activities. The Tongguan Shiquan line is a clear dividing line in the spatial distribution of drivers of vegetation change. Regarding the vegetation improvement, the contribution of climate change and human activities to NDVI increase is 51.75% and 48.25%, respectively. In the degraded vegetation area, the contributions of climate change and human activities to the decrease in NDVI were 22.11% and 77.89%, respectively. Thus, vegetation degradation is mainly caused by human activities. The implementation of policies, such as returning farmland to forest and grass, has an important role in vegetation protection. It is suggested that further attention should be paid to the role of human activities in vegetation degradation when formulating corresponding vegetation protection measures and policies.
Highlights
The continuous intensification of global climate change and human activities has been impacting the stability of the global terrestrial ecosystem (Duan et al, 2020)
Regarding vegetation improvement area (Figure 6A and Figure 6B), the contribution of climate change to vegetation improvement was higher than that of human activities in the Qinling Mountains (51.75% vs. 48.25%), including the NSQM (53.42% vs. 46.58%) and the SSQM (51.41% vs. 48.59%)
The vegetation changes in the Qinling Mountains are caused by the combined effects of climate change and human activities
Summary
The continuous intensification of global climate change and human activities has been impacting the stability of the global terrestrial ecosystem (Duan et al, 2020). The temperature increase aggravates the occurrence of drought, inhibiting vegetation growth in middle-to-low latitude regions, and arid and semiarid regions (Ichii et al, 2002; Zeng et al, 2020; Huang et al, 2021) Precipitation is another important factor affecting vegetation variation (Piao et al, 2015; Shi et al, 2021). Since the industrial revolution, the rapid increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities has promoted the photosynthesis of vegetation (Leakey et al, 2009), resulting in the fertilization effect of CO2, promoting the growth of global vegetation (Zhu et al, 2016) Both climate change and human activities impact vegetation variation, which may intensify the spatial difference of vegetation change. Quantifying the impact of driving factors on vegetation change is essential to ecosystem management and vegetation response to global changes
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