Abstract
Intact Forest Landscape (IFL) is of great value in protecting biodiversity and supporting core ecological processes. It is important to analyze the spatial variation in the growth dynamics of IFL. This study analyzed the change of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) during the growing season (April–October) for boreal (45° N–70° N) IFLs and the correlation with climatic variables over the period of 2000–2013. Our results show 85.5% of boreal IFLs did not show a significant change in the NDVI after 2000, and only 10.2% and 4.3% exhibited a statistically significant increase (greening) or decrease (browning) in NDVI, respectively. About 60.9% of the greening boreal IFLs showed that an increasing NDVI was significantly correlated to climatic variables, especially an increasing growing season temperature (over 47.0%). For browning boreal IFLs, a decrease in temperature or an increase in dormancy period precipitation could be the prime reason for a significant decrease in the NDVI. However, about 64.6% of the browning boreal IFLs were insensitive to any of the climatic variables, indicating other factors, such as fire, had caused the browning. Although it did not show a significant trend, the NDVI of 51.3% of no-change boreal IFLs significantly correlated to climatic variables, especially growing season temperatures (over 37.6%).
Highlights
Forest landscape composes a major part of the terrestrial landscape, occupying about 30% of the world’s land area
An increase in DP precipitation (DP-PRE) significantly correlated with a decrease of GS-Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for 73.4% of the no-change intact forest landscape (IFL) dominated by DP-PRE, which mainly occurred in the Scandinavian and Russian taiga, Interior Alaska-Yukon lowland taiga, and Mid-Continental Canadian forests
We investigated a NDVI-based variation in the growth of boreal intact forest landscapes and the correlation with local climatic variables from 2000 to 2013
Summary
Forest landscape composes a major part of the terrestrial landscape, occupying about 30% of the world’s land area. Intact forest landscapes supply an invaluable natural resource in the study of responses of terrestrial ecosystems to climate without human interference, such as land use change [8]. It is of great significance for understanding the quantitative and the qualitative variations in IFLs in current climatic condition to maintain ecological safety and sustainability. We assume that sensitivities of growth to climatic variables may differ among IFLs in different regions Such analysis would be useful in improving our knowledge of the spatial pattern and climatic regulation mechanism of developments of boreal intact forest landscapes in recent years, as well as supporting studies on the sustainability of intact forest landscapes
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