Vegetation cover changes in China induced by ecological restoration-protection projects and land-use changes from 2000 to 2020

Cai, Yunfei; Zhang, Fei; Duan, Pan; Jim, Chi Yung; Chan, Ngai Weng; Shi, Jingchao; Liu, Changjiang; Wang, Jianguo; Bahtebay, Jupar; Ma, Xu

doi:10.1016/j.catena.2022.106530

Cited by 83 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…More specifically, the North China has experienced a significant (p < 0.05) greening trend. There is well documented evidence that the vegetation greening mainly resulted from implementation of reforestation projects over North China (Chen et al 2019, Cai et al 2022, which supports the modeling results. Similarly, a significant (p < 0.05) greening trend over parts of Turkey is driven mostly by LULCC as modeled by the Noah-MP.…”

Section: The Role Of Lulccsupporting

confidence: 82%

Limited driving of elevated CO₂ on vegetation greening over global drylands

Jian,

Niu,

et al. 2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Drylands are the world's largest biome and dominate the trends and interannual variability of global carbon sinks. Despite the consistency in a “greening” trend of global drylands, large uncertainties remain in attributing its drivers. It is increasingly emphasized that elevated CO2 has greatly contributed to the vegetation greening over global drylands. Here we first quantified the contributions of climate change, elevated CO2, and land use and land cover change (LULCC) on leaf area index (LAI) over drylands, using a process-based land surface model (LSM) Noah-MP to investigate the drivers of vegetation change. The state-of-the-art model shows better performance in simulating the interannual variability of satellite-observed LAI over global drylands compared with that of the multi-model ensemble mean (MMEM) LAI from the TRENDY results. The area that LAI changes dominated by climate change (44.03%) is three times greater than that by CO2 (13.89%), and climate change also contributes most to the global drylands greening trend (55.07%). LULCC shows regional dominance over 13.35% of the global drylands, which is associated with afforestation, woody plant encroachment (WPE), and agricultural intensification. Our results imply that the vegetation greening area driven by elevated CO2 is much limited relative to the overwhelming climatic driving, which should be considered in predictions of trends and interannual variations of global carbon sinks.

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Section: The Role Of Lulccsupporting

confidence: 82%

Limited driving of elevated CO₂ on vegetation greening over global drylands

Jian,

Niu,

et al. 2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…In recent decades, an increasing number of long time-series dense satellite images can be publicly accessed, which tremendously advances the quantification of regional and global vegetation change trends at a longer temporal scale ( Zhu et al., 2016 ; Curtis et al., 2018 ; Hansen et al., 2020 ; Cai et al., 2022 ). Among these datasets is the AVHRR-based GIMMS NDVI dataset, which has also been used for vegetation trends analysis in the karst regions ( Tong et al., 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterization and attribution of vegetation dynamics in the ecologically fragile South China Karst: Evidence from three decadal Landsat observations

et al. 2022

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Plant growth and its changes over space and time are effective indicators for signifying ecosystem health. However, large uncertainties remain in characterizing and attributing vegetation changes in the ecologically fragile South China Karst region, since most existing studies were conducted at a coarse spatial resolution or covered limited time spans. Considering the highly fragmented landscapes in the region, this hinders their capability in detecting fine information of vegetation dynamics taking place at local scales and comprehending the influence of climate change usually over relatively long temporal ranges. Here, we explored the spatiotemporal variations in vegetation greenness for the entire South China Karst region (1.9 million km2) at a resolution of 30m for the notably increased time span (1987-2018) using three decadal Landsat images and the cloud-based Google Earth Engine. Moreover, we spatially attributed the vegetation changes and quantified the relative contribution of driving factors. Our results revealed a widespread vegetation recovery in the South China Karst (74.80%) during the past three decades. Notably, the area of vegetation recovery tripled following the implementation of ecological engineering compared with the reference period (1987-1999). Meanwhile, the vegetation restoration trend was strongly sustainable beyond 2018 as demonstrated by the Hurst exponent. Furthermore, climate change contributed only one-fifth to vegetation restoration, whereas major vegetation recovery was highly attributable to afforestation projects, implying that anthropogenic influences accelerated vegetation greenness gains in karst areas since the start of the new millennium during which ecological engineering was continually established. Our study provides additional insights into ecological restoration and conservation in the highly heterogeneous karst landscapes and other similar ecologically fragile areas worldwide.

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“…Chen et al (2019) found that vegetation changes in China accounts for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area, and forest has contributed 42% of the vegetation growth in the last two decades. Cai et al (2022) also present evidence of China’s reforestation programs, whereby the Ant Forest Project and Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program played an important positive role in China’s overall increase in terrestrial fractional vegetation coverage during 2000–2020.…”

Section: China’s Research Progressmentioning

confidence: 80%

The response of geographical processes to landscape restoration: China’s research progress

Liu

Han

et al. 2023

Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

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The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) provides a new momentum for scaling up ecosystem restoration efforts to landscape restoration. China’s recent experience with transformative investment in landscape restoration provides invaluable guidance for the world. We retrospectively reviewed the scientific evidence on the responses of physical, ecological, and social processes to China’s landscape restoration under geographic heterogeneity and obtained four experiences and lessons. First, China’s forest landscape restoration has successfully promoted vegetation growth and enlarged the carbon sink. Second, landscape restoration has reduced the local water yield, while the regional responses of rainfall are still not clear. Third, the local conditions of soil erosion and habitat quality were largely improved by landscape restoration, while the decreases in soil moisture and streamflow demonstrated significant trade-offs among ecosystem services. Last, geographical differentiation existed in the local responses of livelihoods to landscape restoration strategies, and the win‒win solutions between human development and nature improvement under different landscape contexts were still uncertain. We summarize three additional questions as future prospects: what is the scale of the thresholds to prevent overshoot and cascading negative ecological effects? what are people’s prior needs from nature? considering that there may be no universal win‒win pathways, how to promote co-benefits based on regional human–nature relationships?

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Vegetation cover changes in China induced by ecological restoration-protection projects and land-use changes from 2000 to 2020

Cited by 83 publications

References 63 publications

Limited driving of elevated CO₂ on vegetation greening over global drylands

Limited driving of elevated CO₂ on vegetation greening over global drylands

Characterization and attribution of vegetation dynamics in the ecologically fragile South China Karst: Evidence from three decadal Landsat observations

The response of geographical processes to landscape restoration: China’s research progress

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Vegetation cover changes in China induced by ecological restoration-protection projects and land-use changes from 2000 to 2020

Cited by 83 publications

References 63 publications

Limited driving of elevated CO2 on vegetation greening over global drylands

Limited driving of elevated CO2 on vegetation greening over global drylands

Characterization and attribution of vegetation dynamics in the ecologically fragile South China Karst: Evidence from three decadal Landsat observations

The response of geographical processes to landscape restoration: China’s research progress

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Limited driving of elevated CO₂ on vegetation greening over global drylands

Limited driving of elevated CO₂ on vegetation greening over global drylands