Publications

Li, HX; Guo, JP; Wang, YD; Wang, WY; Jia, Q; Wan, HW; Li, FY (2024). Boundary migration between zonal vegetation types in Inner Mongolia over the past two decades. CATENA, 246, 108354.

Abstract
Vegetation is sensitive to climate changes. Many studies have been done on the boundary transition of vegetation types in response to climate changes along elevation gradient in mountain areas, but less on the boundary transition of zonal vegetation types in vast plain areas. The forest, meadow steppe, typical steppe, desert steppe, and desert vegetation are successively distributed on the 2400 km long transect with climate aridity increasing from the northeast to the southwest in Inner Mongolia. While the climate change impacts on vegetation functions have been assessed, no information is available on if these vegetation types migrate under climate changes. Based on MODIS and Landsat remote sensing data and vegetation type partition data, we first used the random forest classification method to derive the spatiotemporal distribution of these five vegetation types in Inner Mongolia for the period from 2001 to 2020. Then we explored the boundary transitions between the successively distributed vegetation types, and elucidated the causes of the boundary transitions using partial correlation and Spearman's rank correlation analyses between the NDVI and climate data (temperature and precipitation). We found a general and gradual migration of steppe vegetation towards drier area along climatic gradient. Notably, meadow steppe shifted approximately 11,396 km2 into the original typical steppe areas, and desert steppe shifted approximately 22,548 km2 into the original desert areas. This boundary shift phenomenon was primarily influenced by the increase in growing season precipitation over the 20-year period. Our study provides the evidence for the migration of vegetation types along climate gradients in response to climate changes, and provides a method for analyzing vegetation transitions under environmental changes.

DOI:
10.1016/j.catena.2024.108354

ISSN:
1872-6887