Vegetation productivity responses to drought on tribal lands in the four corners region of the Southwest USA
Mohamed Abd Salam EL-VILALY1(), Kamel DIDAN2, Stuart E. MARSH3, Willem J.D. VAN LEEUWEN3, Michael A. CRIMMINS4, Armando Barreto MUNOZ2
1. The International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC 20006-1002, USA 2. Vegetation Index and Phenology Lab, Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0036, USA 3. Arizona Remote Sensing Center, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0043, USA 4. Department of Soils Water and Environmental Science, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0038, USA
For more than a decade, the Four Corners Region has faced extensive and persistent drought conditions that have impacted vegetation communities and local water resources while exacerbating soil erosion. These persistent droughts threaten ecosystem services, agriculture, and livestock activities, and expose the hypersensitivity of this region to inter-annual climate variability and change. Much of the intermountain Western United States has sparse climate and vegetation monitoring stations, making fine-scale drought assessments difficult. Remote sensing data offers the opportunity to assess the impacts of the recent droughts on vegetation productivity across these areas. Here, we propose a drought assessment approach that integrates climate and topographical data with remote sensing vegetation index time series. Multi-sensor Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series data from 1989 to 2010 at 5.6 km were analyzed to characterize the vegetation productivity changes and responses to the ongoing drought. A multi-linear regression was applied to metrics of vegetation productivity derived from the NDVI time series to detect vegetation productivity, an ecosystem service proxy, and changes. The results show that around 60.13% of the study area is observing a general decline of greenness (p<0.05), while 3.87% show an unexpected green up, with the remaining areas showing no consistent change. Vegetation in the area show a significant positive correlation with elevation and precipitation gradients. These results, while, confirming the region’s vegetation decline due to drought, shed further light on the future directions and challenges to the region’s already stressed ecosystems. Whereas the results provide additional insights into this isolated and vulnerable region, the drought assessment approach used in this study may be adapted for application in other regions where surface-based climate and vegetation monitoring record is spatially and temporally limited.
Corresponding Author(s):
Mohamed Abd Salam EL-VILALY
引用本文:
. [J]. Frontiers of Earth Science, 2018, 12(1): 37-51.
Mohamed Abd Salam EL-VILALY, Kamel DIDAN, Stuart E. MARSH, Willem J.D. VAN LEEUWEN, Michael A. CRIMMINS, Armando Barreto MUNOZ. Vegetation productivity responses to drought on tribal lands in the four corners region of the Southwest USA. Front. Earth Sci., 2018, 12(1): 37-51.
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