Response of Grassland Degradation to Drought at Different Time-Scales in Qinghai Province: Spatio-Temporal Characteristics, Correlation, and Implications

Grassland, as the primary vegetation on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, has been increasingly influenced by water availability due to climate change in last decades. Therefore, identifying the evolution of drought becomes crucial to the efficient management of grassland. However, it is not yet well understood as to the quantitative relationship between vegetation variations and drought at different time scales. Taking Qinghai Province as a case, the effects of meteorological drought on vegetation were investigated. Multi-scale Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) considering evapotranspiration variables was used to indicate drought, and time series Normal Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to indicate the vegetation response. The results showed that SPEI values at different time scales reflected a complex dry and wet variation in this region. On a seasonal scale, more droughts occurred in summer and autumn. In general, the NDVI presented a rising trend in the east and southwest part and a decreasing trend in the northwest part of Qinghai Province from 1998 to 2012. Hurst indexes of NDVI revealed that 69.2% of the total vegetation was positively persistent (64.1% of persistent improvement and 5.1% of persistent degradation). Significant correlations were found for most of the SPEI values and the one year lagged NDVI, indicating vegetation made a time-lag response to drought. In addition, one month lagged NDVI made an obvious response to SPEI values at annual and biennial scales. Further analysis showed that all multiscale SPEI values have positive relationships with the NDVI trend and corresponding grassland degradation. The study highlighted the response of vegetation to meteorological drought at different time scales, which is available to predict vegetation change and further help to improve the utilization efficiency of water resources in the study region.

[1]  Petr Štěpánek,et al.  Performance of the standardised precipitation evapotranspiration index at various lags for agricultural drought risk assessment in the Czech Republic , 2015 .

[2]  Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano,et al.  Drought impacts on vegetation activity in the Mediterranean region: An assessment using remote sensing data and multi-scale drought indicators , 2017 .

[3]  Zhu Mingming,et al.  Character of Vegetation Cover Change in China's Eastern Coastal Areas 1998-2008 , 2010 .

[4]  Andrew K. Skidmore,et al.  Integration of multi-sensor data to assess grassland dynamics in a Yellow River sub-watershed , 2012 .

[5]  P. Barbosa,et al.  Mapping global patterns of drought risk: An empirical framework based on sub-national estimates of hazard, exposure and vulnerability , 2016 .

[6]  T. Carlson,et al.  On the relation between NDVI, fractional vegetation cover, and leaf area index , 1997 .

[7]  Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano,et al.  The NAO Impact on Droughts in the Mediterranean Region , 2011 .

[8]  Xu Zongxue.  Long-term Trend and the Sustainability of Air Temperature and Precipitation in the Baiyangdian Basin , 2009 .

[9]  Guo Peng,et al.  Spatiotemporal Variation of Vegetation Coverage Index in North China during the Period from 1982 to 2006 , 2012 .

[10]  R. Pachauri.  Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters , 2012 .

[11]  Qi Hu,et al.  Quality control of daily meteorological data in China, 1951–2000: a new dataset , 2004 .

[12]  Shinjiro Kanae,et al.  A comparative performance analysis of three standardized climatic drought indices in the Chi River basin, Thailand , 2016 .

[13]  Marco Turco,et al.  Recent changes and relations among drought, vegetation and wildfires in the Eastern Mediterranean: The case of Israel , 2017, GPC 2017.

[14]  Chang Cheng-hub.  Correlation Analysis on Typical Vegetation NDVI with Temperature and Precipitation in Otintag Sandy Land , 2013 .

[15]  G. Meera Gandhi,et al.  Ndvi: Vegetation Change Detection Using Remote Sensing and Gis – A Case Study of Vellore District☆ , 2015 .

[16]  Jianlin Wang,et al.  Better resource management: An improved resource and environmental efficiency evaluation approach that considers undesirable outputs , 2018 .

[17]  廖清飞 Liao Qingfei,et al.  Spatiotemporal variation of fractional vegetation coverage and remote sensing monitoring in the eastern agricultural region of Qinghai Province , 2014 .

[18]  Li Jiang-ying.  Variation Characteristics of Extreme Air Temperature Events in Qinghai Province , 2012 .

[19]  Zhang Qingqing,et al.  Climate Change in the Manas River Basin,Xinjiang druing 1956—2007 , 2011 .

[20]  Bing Liu,et al.  Winter and summer monsoonal evolution in northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau during the Holocene period , 2013 .

[21]  Thomas Fischer,et al.  Temperature and precipitation trends and dryness/wetness pattern in the Zhujiang River Basin, South China, 1961–2007 , 2011 .

[22]  Wenhui Kuang,et al.  An Analysis of Temporal Evolution of NDVI in Various Vegetation-Climate Regions in Inner Mongolia, China , 2012 .

[23]  Jiyuan Liu,et al.  Grassland degradation in the “Three-River Headwaters” region, Qinghai Province , 2008 .

[24]  D. Dutta,et al.  Assessment of agricultural drought in Rajasthan (India) using remote sensing derived Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) , 2015 .

[25]  S. Piao,et al.  Spring vegetation green-up date in China inferred from SPOT NDVI data: A multiple model analysis , 2012 .

[26]  C. Azorín-Molina,et al.  Performance of Drought Indices for Ecological, Agricultural, and Hydrological Applications , 2012 .

[27]  Jianlong Li,et al.  Drought-induced dynamics of carbon and water use efficiency of global grasslands from 2000 to 2011 , 2016 .

[28]  Alfredo Granados,et al.  Temporal changes of NDVI for qualitative environmental assessment of mangroves: Shrimp farming impact on the health decline of the arid mangroves in the Gulf of California (1990–2010) , 2016 .

[29]  Bing Zhang,et al.  Country-level net primary production distribution and response to drought and land cover change. , 2017, The Science of the total environment.

[30]  Zha Liang-song.  Analysis on the Future Tendency of Climate Change in Nanjing in the Last 50 Years , 2008 .

[31]  Xiang Zhang,et al.  Modeling aboveground biomass of an alpine desert grassland with SPOT-VGT NDVI , 2015 .

[32]  Ying Zhang,et al.  Quantitative assess the driving forces on the grassland degradation in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, in China , 2016, Ecol. Informatics.

[33]  Li,et al.  Vesetation cover chanse and the drivin8 factors over northwest China , 2011 .

[34]  J. Takáč,et al.  Comparison of SPI and SPEI applicability for drought impact assessment on crop production in the Danubian Lowland and the East Slovakian Lowland , 2017, Theoretical and Applied Climatology.

[35]  F. Meza,et al.  Recent trends and ENSO influence on droughts in Northern Chile: An application of the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index , 2013 .

[36]  Liu Lu.  Study on Occurrence Pattern and Trend of Drought in East Qinghai Province , 2012 .

[37]  Wu Liqiang,et al.  Mann-Kendall Examination and Application in the Analysis of Precipitation Trend , 2008 .

[38]  P. K. Mishra,et al.  Evaluation of drought using SPEI drought class transitions and log-linear models for different agro-ecological regions of India , 2017 .

[39]  Jarosław Zawadzki,et al.  SMOS data as a source of the agricultural drought information: Case study of the Vistula catchment, Poland , 2017 .

[40]  Marco Turco,et al.  Seasonal predictability of summer fires in a Mediterranean environment , 2015 .

[41]  Y. Yamaguchi,et al.  Global correlation analysis for NDVI and climatic variables and NDVI trends: 1982-1990 , 2002 .

[42]  C. Tucker,et al.  Variations in northern vegetation activity inferred from satellite data of vegetation index during 1981 to 1999 , 2001 .

[43]  Zhaoning Gong,et al.  Correlation analysis between vegetation coverage and climate drought conditions in North China during 2001–2013 , 2017, Journal of Geographical Sciences.

[44]  Ping Zhou,et al.  Spatiotemporal characteristics of dryness/wetness conditions across Qinghai Province, Northwest China , 2013 .

[45]  Aifang Chen,et al.  Drought dynamics and impacts on vegetation in China from 1982 to 2011 , 2015 .

[46]  Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano,et al.  A multi-scalar drought index sensitive to global warming: The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index - SPEI , 2009 .

[47]  M. Lewis,et al.  A generalizable NDVI-based wetland delineation indicator for remote monitoring of groundwater flows in the Australian Great Artesian Basin , 2016 .

[48]  Suhong Liu,et al.  Spatio-temporal variability in rangeland conditions associated with climate change in the Altun Mountain National Nature Reserve on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over the past 15 years , 2015 .

[49]  李雪,et al.  基于SPEI和SDI指数的云南红河流域气象水文干旱演变分析@@@Hydrological and meteorological droughts in the Red River Basin of Yunnan Province based on SPEI and SDI Indices , 2016 .

[50]  苏宏新 Su Hongxin,et al.  Low-frequency drought variability based on SPEI in association with climate indices in Beijing , 2012 .

[51]  Fu Bojie,et al.  Response of vegetation to climate change and human activity based on NDVI in the Three-River Headwaters region , 2011 .

[52]  Lihua Yuan,et al.  Spatio-temporal analysis of vegetation variation in the Yellow River Basin , 2015 .

[53]  Hiroshi Ishidaira,et al.  Monotonic trend and step changes in Japanese precipitation , 2003 .

[54]  Shiliang Liu,et al.  Spatiotemporal dynamics of grassland aboveground biomass on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau based on validated MODIS NDVI , 2017, Scientific Reports.

[55]  Vijay P. Singh,et al.  A theoretical drought classification method for the multivariate drought index based on distribution properties of standardized drought indices , 2016 .

[56]  Jeffrey B. Basara,et al.  Sensitivity analysis of vegetation indices to drought over two tallgrass prairie sites , 2015 .

[57]  Baihua Fu,et al.  Riparian vegetation NDVI dynamics and its relationship with climate, surface water and groundwater , 2015 .

[58]  Chao Zhan,et al.  Exploring the geomorphological processes of Qinghai Lake and surrounding lakes in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, using Multitemporal Landsat Imagery (1973–2015) , 2017 .

[59]  H. E. Hurst,et al.  Long-Term Storage Capacity of Reservoirs , 1951 .

[60]  Wei Li,et al.  Effects of drought on the archaeal community in soil of the Zoige wetlands of the Qinghai–Tibetan plateau , 2012 .

[61]  Shunlin Liang,et al.  Time‐lag effects of global vegetation responses to climate change , 2015, Global change biology.

[62]  Melinda Laituri,et al.  Using NDVI to measure precipitation in semi-arid landscapes , 2016 .

[63]  Lei Hongfu,et al.  Hydrological Alteration Analysis Method Based on Hurst Coefficient , 2009 .

[64]  H. Liniger,et al.  Trend analysis of MODIS NDVI time series for detecting land degradation and regeneration in Mongolia , 2015 .