Quantitative Analysis of Driving Factors of Grassland Degradation: A Case Study in Xilin River Basin, Inner Mongolia

Current literature suggests that grassland degradation occurs in areas with poor soil conditions or noticeable environmental changes and is often a result of overgrazing or human disturbances. However, these views are questioned in our analyses. Based on the analysis of satellite vegetation maps from 1984, 1998, and 2004 for the Xilin River Basin, Inner Mongolia, China, and binary logistic regression (BLR) analysis, we observe the following: (1) grassland degradation is positively correlated with the growth density of climax communities; (2) our findings do not support a common notion that a decrease of biological productivity is a direct indicator of grassland degradation; (3) a causal relationship between grazing intensity and grassland degradation was not found; (4) degradation severity increased steadily towards roads but showed different trends near human settlements. This study found complex relationships between vegetation degradation and various microhabitat conditions, for example, elevation, slope, aspect, and proximity to water

GIS-based irrigation evaluation strategy for a rice production region, A

Presented during the Third international conference on irrigation and drainage held March 30 - April 2, 2005 in San Diego, California. The theme of the conference was "Water district management and governance."Includes bibliographical references.Water shortage has become an international problem and this is especially true in China. This paper will detail the process of constructing a GIS-based information system to complete large-scale evaluation for water irrigation efficiency in a rice production region in China. A GIS-based system is built to integrate evaluation models and manage irrigation region actively and present the evaluation result in this paper. The research region is divided into several sub-regions and each sub-region is irrigated differently. After comparison of the results of different irritation methods, the suitable way of irrigation for a certain region can be selected. In this study, each rice production farm field located in sub-regions will be regarded as a basic unit and is digitalized to form spatial database. We monitor all growing stage of paddy rice and record water irrigation and rice yield. The goal is to find region-fit irrigation strategy and thus to enhance the profitability of irrigation water.Sponsored by USCID; co-sponsored by Association of California Water Agencies and International Network for Participatory Irrigation Management

Modeling carbon uptake by vegetation of grassland ecosystems and its associated factors in China based on remote sensing

In order to reveal the spatial variation characteristics and influencing factors of grassland net primary productivity (NPP) in China, this paper uses remote sensing data, land use data and meteorological data to simulate and estimate China’s grassland net primary productivity from 2001 to 2019 using the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA). The trend analysis and complex correlation analysis were used to analyze the relationship with the temporal and spatial changes of grassland NPP from the perspectives of climate factors, topography, longitude and latitude. The results show that: 1) In the past 19 years, the China’s grassland NPP has generally shown a fluctuating upward trend, the spatial distribution of NPP variation shows a characteristic of low in the west and high in the east, with the increased area accounting for 70.39% of the total grassland area, and the low NPP values are mainly distributed in the northwestern part of Tibet and Qinghai and the central part of Inner Mongolia, the average annual NPP is 257.13 g C·m−2·a−1. 2) The change of mean NPP value of grassland in China is more dependent on precipitation (p) than air temperature (T). 3) Grassland NPP showed a decreasing trend with the increase of altitude, and the NPP on the gradient with DEM between 200 m and 500 m was the highest (483.86 g·C·m−2·a−1); The maximum annual mean value (448.42 g C·m−2·a−1) is fallen over the sharp slope of 35°–45°; the NPP of grassland increases with the slope (from shade to sunny), and the NPP of grassland on the semi-sunny slope increases. The annual average NPP is the highest (270.87 g C·m−2·a−1). 4) The mean value of grassland NPP was negatively correlated with the change of latitude, and showed a “wave-like” downward trend from south to north; the mean value of grassland NPP was positively related to the change of longitude. The correlation relationship shows a “stepped” upward trend from west to east

Assessment of Human-Related Driving Forces for Reduced Carbon Uptake Using Neighborhood Analysis and Geographically Weighted Regression: A Case Study in the Grassland of Inner Mongolia, China

The ever-rising concentration of atmospheric carbon is viewed as the primary cause for global warming. To discontinue this trend, it is of urgent importance to either cut down human carbon emissions or remove more carbon from the atmosphere. Grassland ecosystems occupy the largest part of the global land area but maintain a relatively low carbon sequestration flux. While numerous studies have confirmed the impacts on grassland vegetation growth from climate changes and human activities, little work has been done to understand the driving forces for a reduced carbon uptake (RCU)—a loss in vegetation carbon sequestration because of inappropriate grassland management. This work focused on assessing RCU in the grassland of Inner Mongolia and understanding the influential patterns of the selected variables (including grazing intensity, road network, population, and vegetation productivity) related to RCU. Neighborhood analysis was proposed to locate optimized grassland management practices from historical data and to map RCU. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models were applied to explore the driving forces for RCU. The results indicated that the human-related factors, including stock grazing intensity, population density, and road network were likely to present a spatially varied impact on RCU, which accounted for more than 1/4 of the total carbon sequestration

Detecting grassland cover changes through spatiotemporal outlier analysis using remotely sensed time-series data: a case study from Xilingol, China

Significant land cover change (SLCC) in grassland ecosystem includes both conversions in land cover types and critical modifications to specific land cover properties without land cover conversions. A statistics-based framework, known as spatiotemporal outlier analysis (STOA), was proposed to detect SLCC from time-series remote sensing data considering both spatial and temporal contexts. The proposed STOA combines local spatial association analysis (spatial context) and temporal variation analysis (temporal context) to extract spatiotemporal outliers. As the case study, STOA was applied to mapping SLCC on the grassland of Xilinhot, China using time-series MODIS vegetation index during 2000–2015. The results clearly revealed the anisotropic characteristics and spatio-temporal variations in the extracted SLCC, demonstrating meaningful patterns in the land cover changes (LCC). Considering the scale-effect, it is inferred that the detected SLCC is most likely attributed to human-induced impact. We conclude that STOA is a promising tool to quantify LCC for grassland ecosystems

Exploring the Dynamics of Urban Greenness Space and Their Driving Factors Using Geographically Weighted Regression: A Case Study in Wuhan Metropolis, China

Urban greenness plays a vital role in supporting the ecosystem services of a city. Exploring the dynamics of urban greenness space and their driving forces can provide valuable information for making solid urban planning policies. This study aims to investigate the dynamics of urban greenness space patterns through landscape indices and to apply geographically weighted regression (GWR) to map the spatially varied impact on the indices from economic and environmental factors. Two typical landscape indices, i.e., percentage of landscape (PLAND) and aggregation index (AI), which measure the abundance and fragmentation of urban greenness coverage, respectively, were taken to map the changes in urban greenness. As a case study, the metropolis of Wuhan, China was selected, where time-series of urban greenness space were extracted at an annual step from the Landsat collections from Google Earth Engine during 2000–2018. The study shows that the urban greenness space not only decreased significantly, but also tended to be more fragmented over the years. Road network density, normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), terrain elevation and slope, and precipitation were found to significantly correlate to the landscape indices. GWR modeling successfully captures the spatially varied impact from the considered factors and the results from GWR modeling provide a critical reference for making location-specific urban planning

Classifying historical remotely sensed imagery using a tempo-spatial feature evolution (T-SFE) model

Large and growing archives of orbital imagery of the earth\u27s surface collected over the past 40 years provide an important resource for documenting past and current land cover and environmental changes. However uses of these data are limited by the lack of coincident ground information with which either to establish discrete land cover classes or to assess the accuracy of their identification. Herein is proposed an easy-to-use model, the Tempo-Spatial Feature Evolution (T-SFE) model, designed to improve land cover classification using historical remotely sensed data and ground cover maps obtained at later times. This model intersects (1) a map of spectral classes (S-classes) of an initial time derived from the standard unsupervised ISODATA classifier with (2) a reference map of ground cover types (G-types) of a subsequent time to generate (3) a target map of overlaid patches of S-classes and G-types. This model employs the rules of Count Majority Evaluation, and Subtotal Area Evaluation that are formulated on the basis of spatial feature evolution over time to quantify spatial evolutions between the S-classes and G-types on the target map. This model then applies these quantities to assign G-types to S-classes to classify the historical images. The model is illustrated with the classification of grassland vegetation types for a basin in Inner Mongolia using 1985 Landsat TM data and 2004 vegetation map. The classification accuracy was assessed through two tests: a small set of ground sampling data in 1985, and an extracted vegetation map from the national vegetation cover data (NVCD) over the study area in 1988. Our results show that a 1985 image classification was achieved using this method with an overall accuracy of 80.6%. However, the classification accuracy depends on a proper calibration of several parameters used in the model. (C) 2009 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved