Abstract
Land use and land cover change induced by large scale ecological restoration programs has a significant impact on the terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle, especially on the net primary productivity (NPP) in arid and semi-arid regions. This study investigated the change in NPP caused by the large-scale ecological restoration in the Chinese Loess Plateau (LPR) region from 1986 to 2015 based on land cover datasets and NPP calculated using the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach model. The results indicated that the annual total NPP exhibited a significant uptrend (P < 0.01) throughout the whole vegetation restoration region during the last 30 years, with an annual increase of 0.137 Tg C. A significant abrupt change was detected in 2006 for the annual total NPP series. Over half of the restoration region showed an increase in NPP in the past three decades, however, about 30~40% of the vegetation restoration region exhibited NPP loss before 2006, but subsequently NPP loss was found in only approximately 20% of the study region. Overall, the increase in NPP attributed to the vegetation restoration reached 51.14 Tg C in the past three decades, indicating that these large-scale vegetation restoration programs increased the carbon sequestration capacity of terrestrial ecosystems in the Loess Plateau. The findings of this study improve our understanding of the effects of the green campaign on terrestrial ecosystems.
Highlights
Land use and cover change (LUCC) caused by human activities fundamentally affects the composition, structure, and function of natural ecosystems [1,2]
We evaluated the variations of net primary productivity (NPP) throughout the vegetation restoration region and assessed the impacts
The annual total and mean NPP show a significant increase in the whole vegetation restoration region of Loess Plateau region (LPR) during the past three decades
Summary
Land use and cover change (LUCC) caused by human activities fundamentally affects the composition, structure, and function of natural ecosystems [1,2]. The human-driven changes essentially convert landscapes, and alter the carbon storage and flux of terrestrial ecosystems [3,4]. A series of large-scale vegetation restoration programs have been implemented to prevent environmental degradation in China [8, 9]. These vegetation restoration projects have significantly changed the land cover patterns [10, 11].
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