Assessing the contribution of human activities and climate change to the dynamics of NPP in ecologically fragile regions

作者：Ma, Bingxin; Jing, Juanli^*; Liu, Bing; Wang, Yongfeng; He, Hongchang

来源：Global Ecology and Conservation, 2023, 42: e02393.

DOI：10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02393

• Ecologically fragile regions
• Ecological security
• NPP
• Climate change
• Human activities

Fragile ecological regions are the key zones for conducting ecological engineering construction. Exploring the intrinsic linkage between vegetation dynamics and climate change and human activities is important for the government to formulate reasonable and effective environmental protection policies in different types of ecologically fragile regions. This study used Net Primary Productivity (NPP) as an indicator, based on multitemporal land use data, to separate anthropogenic and climatic disturbance areas. We revealed the vegetation dynamics, explored the roles of temperature and precipitation, and assessed the relative contributions of human activities and climate change to vegetation dynamics in four types of ecologically fragile regions in China from 2001 to 2019. The study indicated that NPP showed increasing trends to different degrees in the arid region of northwest China (AN), the Loess Plateau (LP), the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and the karst region of southwest (KS) China in the early 21st century. The correlation between NPP dynamics and precipitation was higher than that between temperature and NPP dynamics in ecologically fragile regions. In the northern arid zone, precipitation was an important cause of the increase in NPP. The drought resistance of vegetation largely symbolized its ability to resist the risk of ecological degradation. Climate change has played a positive role in vegetation growth in ecologically fragile regions. Except for the TP, human activities have contributed to vegetation construction in other ecologically fragile regions, with the strongest contribution to NPP in LP (2.10 gC m(- 2) yr(-1)), which indicated some progress in vegetation construction in this region. Due to the degradation of forests and grasslands caused by overgrazing and farmland reclamation on the TP, government departments should give timely attention to ecological security and avoid causing land degradation. In the future, we suggest that natural and humanitarian characteristics should be considered before formulating environmental protection policies in ecologically fragile regions, and environmental protection measures should be reasonably taken to achieve the effectiveness and standardization of ecological environmental management.

• 单位
  桂林理工大学