Vegetation Changing Patterns and Its Sensitivity to Climate Variability across Seven Major Watersheds in China

Abstract

Climate changes have profound impacts on vegetation and further alter hydrological processes through transpiration, interception, and evaporation. This study investigated vegetation’s changing patterns and its sensitivity to climate variability across seven major watersheds in China based on a hybrid regionalization approach and a novel, empirical index—Vegetation Sensitivity Index (VSI). Vegetation showed linearly increasing trends in most of the seven watersheds, while decreases in vegetation were mostly found in the source regions of the Yangtze River Basin (YZRB) and Yellow River Basin (YRB), the forest and grassland areas of the Songhua River Basin (SHRB) and Liao River Basin (LRB), the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta during the growing season. The selected watersheds can be categorized into 11 sub-regions, and the regionalization result was consistent with the topography and vegetation types; the characteristics of vegetation dynamics were more homogeneous among sub-regions. Vegetation types such as forests and shrubland in the central parts of the YZRB were relatively more vulnerable to climate variations than the grasslands and alpine meadows and tundra (AMT) in the source regions of the YZRB and YRB and the Loess Plateau of the YRB. In arid and semi-arid regions, precipitation had a profound impact on vegetation, while, at low latitudes, solar radiation was the main controlling factor. Such comprehensive investigations of the vegetation–climate relationship patterns across various watersheds are expected to provide a foundation for the exploration of future climate change impacts on ecosystems at the watershed scale.

Effects of Climatic Disturbance on the Trade-Off between the Vegetation Pattern and Water Balance Based on a Novel Model and Accurately Remotely Sensed Data in a Semiarid Basin

“…Vegetation, as an important ecosystem component, plays a vital role in maintaining the hydrological balance between watersheds and their response to climate change [1]. Climate change is a key influencing factor of vegetation that can affect hydrological processes through a range of biophysical processes [2][3][4]. Vegetation and hydrological processes have a mutually interactive relationship, whereby vegetation can influence hydrological processes in a watershed by affecting rainfall, and hydrological processes can affect vegetation growth through factors such as soil water storage [5,6].…”