Prevalence of vegetation browning in China’s drylands under climate change

Abstract

Vegetation greening has long been acknowledged, but recent studies have pointed out that vegetation greening is possibly stalled or even reversed. However, detailed analyses about greening reversal or increased browning of vegetation remain scarce. In this study, we utilized the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as an indicator of vegetation to investigate the trends of vegetation greening and browning (monotonic, interruption, and reversal) through the breaks for the additive season and trend (BFAST) method across China’s drylands from 1982 to 2022. It also reveals the impacts of ecological restoration programs (ERPs) and climate change on these vegetation trends. We find that the vegetation displays an obvious pattern of east-greening and west-browning in China’s drylands. Greening trends mainly exhibits monotonic greening (29.8 %) and greening with setback (36.8 %), whereas browning shows a greening to browning reversal (19.2 %). The increase rate of greening to browning reversal is 0.0342/yr, which is apparently greater than that of greening with setback, 0.0078/yr. This research highlights that, under the background of widespread vegetation greening, vegetation browning is progressively increasing due to the effects of climate change. Furthermore, the ERPs have significantly increased vegetation coverage, with the increase rate in 2000–2022 being twice as much as that of 1982–1999 in revegetation regions. Vegetation browning in southwestern Qingzang Plateau is primarily driven by adverse climatic factors and anthropogenic disturbances, which offset the efforts of ERPs.

Keywords

China’s drylands / Ecological restoration programs / Climate change / Greening to browning reversal / BFAST

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Li Fu: Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Guolong Zhang: Data curation, Methodology. Jianping Huang: Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Ming Peng: Data curation, Investigation. Lei Ding: Data curation, Investigation. Dongliang Han: Data curation, Investigation.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 41991231, 42041004, and 41888101), the China University Research Talents Recruitment Program (111 project, Grant No. B13045). The authors acknowledge Guangyao Gao for providing the ecological restoration programs dataset.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.04.002.

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