State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China.
CSIRO Data 61, Australian Resources Research Centre, Kensington, WA 6151, Australia.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Oct 26;19(21):13916. doi: 10.3390/ijerph192113916.
Climate changes have profound impacts on vegetation and further alter hydrological processes through transpiration, interception, and evaporation. This study investigated vegetation's changing patterns and its sensitivity to climate variability across seven major watersheds in China based on a hybrid regionalization approach and a novel, empirical index-Vegetation Sensitivity Index (VSI). Vegetation showed linearly increasing trends in most of the seven watersheds, while decreases in vegetation were mostly found in the source regions of the Yangtze River Basin (YZRB) and Yellow River Basin (YRB), the forest and grassland areas of the Songhua River Basin (SHRB) and Liao River Basin (LRB), the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta during the growing season. The selected watersheds can be categorized into 11 sub-regions, and the regionalization result was consistent with the topography and vegetation types; the characteristics of vegetation dynamics were more homogeneous among sub-regions. Vegetation types such as forests and shrubland in the central parts of the YZRB were relatively more vulnerable to climate variations than the grasslands and alpine meadows and tundra (AMT) in the source regions of the YZRB and YRB and the Loess Plateau of the YRB. In arid and semi-arid regions, precipitation had a profound impact on vegetation, while, at low latitudes, solar radiation was the main controlling factor. Such comprehensive investigations of the vegetation-climate relationship patterns across various watersheds are expected to provide a foundation for the exploration of future climate change impacts on ecosystems at the watershed scale.
气候变化通过蒸腾、截留和蒸发等过程对植被产生深远影响，并进一步改变水文过程。本研究基于混合分区方法和新颖的经验指数——植被敏感性指数（VSI），探讨了中国七大流域植被的变化模式及其对气候变异性的敏感性。研究发现，大多数流域的植被呈线性增长趋势，但在长江流域（YZRB）和黄河流域（YRB）的源头地区、松花江流域（SHRB）和辽河流域（LRB）的森林和草原地区、长江三角洲和珠江三角洲的生长季节，植被减少的情况更为常见。所选流域可分为 11 个子区，分区结果与地形和植被类型一致；子区内植被动态特征更为相似。YZRB 中部的森林和灌丛等植被类型比 YZRB 和 YRB 的源头地区的草原和高山草甸及苔原（AMT）以及 YRB 的黄土高原地区更为脆弱，易受气候变化的影响。在干旱和半干旱地区，降水对植被有深远的影响，而在低纬度地区，太阳辐射是主要的控制因素。对不同流域植被-气候关系模式的综合研究，有望为探索未来气候变化对流域尺度生态系统的影响提供基础。
