Analysis of Spatiotemporal Evolution and Influencing Factors of Vegetation Net Primary Productivity in the Yellow River Basin from 2000 to 2022

Abstract

The Yellow River Basin (YRB) plays a very important role in China’s economic and social development and ecological security, so studying the spatiotemporal variation characteristics of net primary productivity (NPP) and its influencing factors is of great significance for protecting the stable development of its ecological environment. This article takes the YRB as the research area, based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, climate data, terrain data, land data, social data, and the gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) data. The spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of vegetation NPP in the YRB from 2000 to 2022 were explored using methods such as trend analysis, correlation analysis, and geographic detectors, and the correlation characteristics of NPP with meteorological factors, social factors, and total water storage (TWS) were evaluated. The results indicate that the NPP of vegetation in the YRB showed an increasing trend (4.989 gC·m−2·a−1) from 2000 to 2022, with the most significant changes occurring in the middle reaches of the YRB. The correlation coefficient indicates that temperature and accumulated temperature have a significant positive impact on the change of NPP, while TWS has a significant negative impact. In the study of the factors affecting vegetation NPP in the YRB, the most influential factors are soil type (0.48), precipitation (0.46), and temperature (0.32). The strong correlation between TWS and vegetation NPP in the YRB is about 39%, with a contribution rate of about 0.12, which is a factor that cannot be ignored in studying vegetation NPP changes in the YRB.

Characteristics of the evolution of vegetation NPP in Nanchang and spatial and temporal driver analyses

“…Historical events have shown that extreme weather events causing climate change c oincide with years when NPP values fluctuate.These sudden changes can have impacts on urban planning,human life,city climate circulation and can directly or indirectly affect v egetation growth.This indirectly confirms the significant impact of climate factors on NPP, consistent with previous findings that temperature and rainfall significantly influence NPP evolution. Future climate change will be more complex, and the synergistic effects of vari ous meteorological factors will become more pronounced (Tian et al 2024).Further in-dep th research is still needed on this issue.…”

“…Climate change can affect the NPP index, and human activities caused by social dev elopment can also interfere with the growth of vegetation (Yu et al2021;Wei et al2022),le ading to a series of ecological problems such as soil erosion and vegetation pollution.The refore, the research on the spatiotemporal evolution of vegetation NPP and the analysis of meteorological and anthropogenic driving factors are of great significance. Wang et al( 2024) found that the impacts of land-use and land-cover change(LULCC) are expected t o be relatively limited compared to climate change.Changes in precipitation were also fou nd to be positively correlated with changes in NPP,with the effect being relatively more pr onounced; analysed the spatial and temporal patterns, trends and driv ers of net productivity of vegetation in the Three North Shelter Forests (TNSF) using an i mproved residual trend method, and found that the influence of climatic factors was muc h greater than that of human activities, but that the contribution of human activities had in creased by 7% over the past decade; Zhao et al(2023) found that human activities play a n important role in vegetation restoration through ecological projects, and that vegetation degradation is mainly attributed to the combined effects of climate change and human ac tivities; Kosykh et al(2023) studied the productivity of water meadows in the middle strea m of the Ob River, confirming that plant biomass was greatest in areas dominated by shr ubs under different topographic conditions; Xue et al(2021) comprehensively reflected ec osystem resilience in multiple dimensions,confirming that ecosystem resilience was high est in plains oases,and that artificial vegetation had the highest resilience, while forests h ad the lowest resilience.…”