Abstract
It is generally believed that there is an inverse relationship between population growth and vegetation cover. However, reports about vegetation protection and reforestation around the World have been continuously increasing in recent decades, which seems to indicate that this relationship may not be true. In this paper, we have taken 21 cities in Guangdong Province, China as the study area to test the long-term relationship between population growth and vegetation cover, using an AVHRR NDVI data set and the panel cointegrated regression method. The results show that there is a long-term inverted N-shaped curve relationship between population growth and vegetation cover in the region where there are frequent human activities and the influence of climate change on vegetation cover changes is relatively small. The two turning points of the inverted N-shaped curve for the case of Guangdong Province correspond to 2,200 persons·km−2 and 3,820 persons·km−2, and they can provide a reference range for similar regions of the World. It also states that the population urbanization may have a negative impact on the vegetation cover at the early stage, but have a positive impact at the later stage. In addition, the Panel Error Correction Model (PECM) is used to investigate the causality direction between population growth and vegetation cover. The results show that not only will the consuming destruction effect and planting construction effect induced by the population growth have a great impact on vegetation cover changes, but vegetation cover changes in turn will also affect the population growth in the long term.
Highlights
The results show that will the consuming destruction effect and planting construction effect induced by the population growth have a great impact on vegetation cover changes, but vegetation cover changes in turn will affect the population growth in the long term
Vegetation plays an important role in energy conversion and material circulation of the Earth, and vegetation cover is a visual sign of ecosystem health [1]
We have obtained the following conclusions: (1) There can be a positive relationship between population growth and vegetation cover
Summary
Vegetation plays an important role in energy conversion and material circulation of the Earth, and vegetation cover is a visual sign of ecosystem health [1]. The available studies about population and vegetation cover have mainly focused on the destructive effects of human activities on vegetation [9,10,11,12]. Tourism activities do lead to the death of some plants, and subsequently exert a great negative effect on the growth of plants [18,19,20]. The destructive effects of human activities on vegetation have exerted an increasingly severe impact on the ecological environment, resulting in grassland degradation, deforestation, desertification, farmland reduction, soil erosion and other serious consequences [21]
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