Satellite‐Observed Major Greening and Biomass Increase in South China Karst During Recent Decade

Abstract

Above-ground vegetation biomass is one of the major carbon sinks and provides both provisioning (e.g., forestry products) and regulating ecosystem services (by sequestering carbon). Continuing deforestation and climate change threaten this natural resource but can effectively be countered by national conservation policies. Here we present time series (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017) derived from complementary satellite systems to describe a phenomenon of global significance: the greening of South China Karst. We find a major increase in growing season vegetation cover from 69% in 1999 to 81% in 2017 occurring over~1.4 million km 2 . Over 1999-2012, we report one of the globally largest increases in biomass to occur in the South China Karst region (on average +4% over 0.9 million km 2 ), which accounts for~5% of the global areas characterized with increases in biomass. These increases in southern China's vegetation have occurred despite a decline in rainfall (À8%) and soil moisture (À5%) between 1999 and 2012 and are derived from effects of forestry and conservation activities at an unprecedented spatial scale in human history (~20,000 km 2 yr À1 since 2002). These findings have major implications for the provisioning of ecosystem services not only for the Chinese karst ecosystem (e.g., carbon storage, water filtration, and timber production) but also for the study of global carbon cycles.

Multicomponent Satellite Assessment of Drought Severity in the Contiguous United States From 2002 to 2017 Using AMSR‐E and AMSR2

“…The LPDR data are posted to a consistent 25-km global Equal-Area Scalable Earth (EASE) Grid projection format (Armstrong & Brodzik, 1995). The current AMSR LPDR (version 2) has been used for a diverse set of science application studies, including quantifying the influence of vegetation and soil moisture conditions on SMAP FW retrievals (Du, Kimball, Galantowicz, et al, 2018), studying ecosystem water storage and phenology (Brandt et al, 2018;Tian et al, 2018), detecting vegetation isohydry/anisohydry behavior and resilience to drought (Anderegg et al, 2018;Li et al, 2017), and mapping paddy rice planting areas (Song et al, 2018).…”

Stand Structure and Abiotic Factors Modulate Karst Forest Biomass in Southwest China

“…Previous studies have assessed the biomass in this region on small and large scales. For example, the largest biomass increase in the world occurred in the South China karst region between 1999 and 2012 [10]. Other studies reported the biomass in typical karst ecosystems, or along vegetation restoration areas based on surveys of small plots [2,6,[11][12][13][14].…”

Karst landscapes of China: patterns, ecosystem processes and services

“…It was found that conservation practices contributed significantly to increasing ABC during the period of project implementation. Finally, it was found that over 0.9 million km 2 of land in the region (75.3% of the land area) had, on-average, a 4% increase in biomass (Brandt et al 2018). Results from these studies appear to suggest that ecological engineering has contributed significantly to ecosystem recovery over much of the karst region.…”

“…Information from various sources indicate that the karst environment improved in the past 20 years (Zhang et al 2017). Specifically, a significant increase in aboveground biomass (on average C 4.0% over 0.9 million km 2 ) between 1999 and 2012 had occurred at the regional scale, which makes up approximately 5% of global areas with increasing biomass (Brandt et al 2018;Tong et al 2018). Aerial cover of KRD in southwestern China has decreased from 129,600 km 2 in 2006 (10.8% of the land area) to 100,700 km 2 in 2016 (8.4% of the land area).…”