Spatio-Temporal Patterns and Driving Forces of Desertification in Otindag Sandy Land, Inner Mongolia, China, in Recent 30 Years

Background: Desertification is one of the main obstacles to global sustainable development. Monitoring, evaluating and mastering its driving factors are very important for the prevention and control of desertification. As one of the largest deserts in China, the development of desertification in Otindag Sandy Land (OSL) resulted in the reduction in land productivity and serious ecological/environmental consequences. Although many ecological restoration projects have been carried out, the vegetation restoration of OSL and the impact mechanism of climate and human activities on desertification remain unclear. Methods: Taking OSL as the research area, this paper constructs the desertification index by using the remote sensing images and meteorological and socio-economic data, between 1986 and 2016, and analyzes the spatio-temporal evolution process and driving factors of desertification by using trend analysis and spearman rank correlation. Results: The results showed that: (1) Desertification in the OSL has fluctuated greatly during the past 30 years. Desertification recovered between 1986 and 1990, expanded and increased between 1990 and 2000, reduced between 2000 and 2004, developed rapidly between 2004 and 2007, and recovered again between 2007 and 2016; (2) The desertification of OSL is dominated by a non-significant change trend, accounting for 73.27%. In the significant change trend, the area of desertification rising trend is 20.32%, which is mainly located in the north and east, and the area of declining trend is 6.41%, which is mainly located in the southwest; (3) Desertification is the result of the superposition of climate and human activities. Climate change is the main influencing factor, followed by human activities, and the superposition effects of the two are spatio-temporal differences. Conclusions: These results shed light on the development of desertification in OSL and the relative importance and complex interrelationship between human activities and climate in regulating the process of desertification. Based on this, we suggest continuing to implement the ecological restoration policy and avoid the destruction of vegetation by large-scale animal husbandry in order to improve the situation of desertification.

[1]  W. von Bloh,et al.  Desertification process and its effects on vegetation carbon sources and sinks vary under different aridity stress in Central Asia during 1990–2020 , 2023, CATENA.

[2]  Bing Guo,et al.  The dominant driving factors of rocky desertification and their variations in typical mountainous karst areas of southwest China in the context of global change , 2023, CATENA.

[3]  Weiqi Wang,et al.  Alhagi sparsifolia: An ideal phreatophyte for combating desertification and land degradation. , 2022, The Science of the total environment.

[4]  Zhiqiang Xiao,et al.  Desertification in the Mu Us Sandy Land in China: Response to Climate Change and Human Activity from 2000 to 2020 , 2022, Geography and Sustainability.

[5]  Duanyang Xu,et al.  Linking priority areas and land restoration options to support desertification control in northern China , 2022, Ecological Indicators.

[6]  Xubin Pan,et al.  A new scientific framework of dryland ecological quality assessment based on 1OAO principle , 2022, Ecological Indicators.

[7]  A. Abuzaid,et al.  Assessment of desertification using modified MEDALUS model in the north Nile Delta, Egypt , 2022 .

[8]  Xunming Wang,et al.  The impact of climate change on aeolian desertification in northern China: Assessment using aridity index , 2021 .

[9]  L. Sharma,et al.  Spatio-temporal assessment of Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) in The Thar Desert India, to combat desertification under UNCCD framework , 2021 .

[10]  A. Collins,et al.  Desertification of Iran in the early twenty-first century: assessment using climate and vegetation indices , 2021, Scientific Reports.

[11]  A. Unal,et al.  Dried bottom of Urmia Lake as a new source of dust in the northwestern Iran: Understanding the impacts on local and regional air quality , 2021 .

[12]  J. Lei,et al.  Monitoring desertification in Mongolia based on Landsat images and Google Earth Engine from 1990 to 2020 , 2021 .

[13]  Bin Wang,et al.  Variation in Vegetation and Its Driving Force in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River in China , 2021, Water.

[14]  C. Yan,et al.  Path analysis model to identify and analyse the causes of aeolian desertification in Mu Us Sandy Land, China , 2021 .

[15]  N. Zhou,et al.  Comparative study of desertification control policies and regulations in representative countries of the Belt and Road Initiative , 2021 .

[16]  Xiaofei Ma,et al.  Projections of desertification trends in Central Asia under global warming scenarios. , 2021, The Science of the total environment.

[17]  E. Arai,et al.  Corrigendum to “Analysis of areas undergoing desertification, using EVI2 multi-temporal data based on MODIS imagery as indicator” [Ecological Indicators (2020) 106004] , 2020 .

[18]  P. Nwilo,et al.  Impacts of land cover changes on desertification in northern Nigeria and implications on the Lake Chad Basin , 2020 .

[19]  Jens-Christian Svenning,et al.  Ecological restoration is the dominant driver of the recent reversal of desertification in the Mu Us Desert (China) , 2020 .

[20]  Andréas Heinen,et al.  Spearman rank correlation of the bivariate Student t and scale mixtures of normal distributions , 2020, J. Multivar. Anal..

[21]  Xiaolin Zhu,et al.  Monitoring interannual dynamics of desertification in Minqin County, China, using dense Landsat time series , 2020, Int. J. Digit. Earth.

[22]  Qun'ou Jiang,et al.  Analysis of critical land degradation and development processes and their driving mechanism in the Heihe River Basin. , 2020, The Science of the total environment.

[23]  Zeng-yuan Li,et al.  Identification and assessment of the factors driving vegetation degradation/regeneration in drylands using synthetic high spatiotemporal remote sensing Data—A case study in Zhenglanqi, Inner Mongolia, China , 2019 .

[24]  Junpeng Lou,et al.  Effects of Earth surface processes on the heterogeneity of surface soil elements and the responses of vegetation elements in the Otindag Desert, China , 2019 .

[25]  Moulley Charaf Chabou,et al.  Spectral signs of aeolian activity around a sand-dune belt in northern Algeria , 2019, CATENA.

[26]  W. Liang,et al.  Analysis of the desertification dynamics of sandy lands in Northern China over the period 2000–2017 , 2019, Geocarto International.

[27]  Zeng-yuan Li,et al.  Estimating Soil Organic Carbon Density in the Otindag Sandy Land, Inner Mongolia, China, for modelling spatiotemporal variations and evaluating the influences of human activities , 2019, CATENA.

[28]  Shiqi Tian,et al.  Factors Affecting Long-Term Trends in Global NDVI , 2019, Forests.

[29]  C. Yan,et al.  Dynamic monitoring of aeolian desertification based on multiple indicators in Horqin Sandy Land, China. , 2019, The Science of the total environment.

[30]  Mariam Akhtar-Schuster,et al.  Land degradation neutrality: The science-policy interface from the UNCCD to national implementation , 2019, Environmental Science & Policy.

[31]  V. Brovkin,et al.  China and India lead in greening of the world through land-use management , 2019, Nature Sustainability.

[32]  Xiuqin Wu,et al.  Effects of seasonal variability of climatic factors on vegetation coverage across drylands in northern China , 2018 .

[33]  Biswajeet Pradhan,et al.  Spatial Monitoring of Desertification Extent in Western Iraq using Landsat Images and GIS , 2017 .

[34]  Jason D. Tack,et al.  Doing more with less: Removing trees in a prairie system improves value of grasslands for obligate bird species. , 2017, Journal of environmental management.

[35]  Shenggang Ren,et al.  Can environmental regulation promote the coordinated development of economy and environment in China’s manufacturing industry?–A panel data analysis of 28 sub-sectors , 2017 .

[36]  Heyuan You.  Orienting rocky desertification towards sustainable land use: An advanced remote sensing tool to guide the conservation policy , 2017 .

[37]  Xunming Wang,et al.  Spatial differences of aeolian desertification responses to climate in arid Asia , 2017 .

[38]  Jixia Huang,et al.  Estimating Loess Plateau Average Annual Precipitation with Multiple Linear Regression Kriging and Geographically Weighted Regression Kriging , 2016 .

[39]  Jianping Huang,et al.  Accelerated dryland expansion under climate change , 2016 .

[40]  O. Orabi,et al.  Differential dissolution susceptibility of Paleocene foraminiferal assemblage from Farafra Oasis, Egypt , 2016 .

[41]  Woo-Kyun Lee,et al.  Assessment of land cover change and desertification using remote sensing technology in a local region of Mongolia , 2016 .

[42]  S. Ramakrishnan,et al.  Modeling the contributing factors of desertification and evaluating their relationships to the soil degradation process through geomatic techniques , 2015 .

[43]  Carlos Alberto Mastachi-Loza,et al.  Assessing desertification risk in the semi-arid highlands of central Mexico , 2015 .

[44]  H. Su,et al.  Long-term livestock exclusion facilitates native woody plant encroachment in a sandy semiarid rangeland , 2015, Ecology and evolution.

[45]  Zeng-yuan Li,et al.  Degraded land detection by soil particle composition derived from multispectral remote sensing data in the Otindag Sandy Lands of China , 2015 .

[46]  Jimin Sun,et al.  Environmental changes in Hunshandake (Otindag) sandy land revealed by optical dating and multi-proxy study of dune sands , 2013 .

[47]  L. Yue.  The environmental transformation from Late Last glacial to Holocene of Otindag sandyland , 2012 .

[48]  Tao Wang,et al.  Monitoring recent trends in the area of aeolian desertified land using Landsat images in China’s Xinjiang region , 2012 .

[49]  S. Brain.  The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature , 2010, Environmental History.

[50]  W. Tao.  Regionalization for Aeolian Desertification Control and Countermeasures in the Otindag Sandy Land Region,China , 2010 .

[51]  Li Jixiang.  Effect of fencing on community characteristics of degenerated grassland in Hunshandake Sand , 2009 .

[52]  A. Hanafi,et al.  Are long-term vegetation dynamics useful in monitoring and assessing desertification processes in the arid steppe, southern Tunisia , 2008 .

[53]  Liu Haijiang,et al.  Monitoring sandy desertification of Otindag Sandy Land based on multi-date remote sensing images , 2008 .

[54]  Xiaoping Yang,et al.  Processes and mechanisms of desertification in northern China during the last 30 years, with a special reference to the Hunshandake Sandy Land, eastern Inner Mongolia , 2007 .

[55]  Ranga B. Myneni,et al.  Remote sensing of vegetation and land-cover change in Arctic Tundra Ecosystems , 2004 .

[56]  M. S. Moran,et al.  Spatial and temporal dynamics of vegetation in the San Pedro River basin area , 2000 .

[57]  G. Gutman,et al.  The derivation of the green vegetation fraction from NOAA/AVHRR data for use in numerical weather prediction models , 1998 .

[58]  J. R. Wallis,et al.  Robustness of the rescaled range R/S in the measurement of noncyclic long run statistical dependence , 1969 .

[59]  J. Dahl.  Progress and development of the Prairie States Forestry Project. , 1940 .