Climate can have significant effects on vegetation, and understanding the effect of regional climate change on vegetation is becoming more and more important. At present, studies on vegetation response to climate change mostly focus on forest and grassland vegetation, but the research on the effect of climate change on wetland vegetation is relatively less.
The area of marsh wetland over China was the third largest in the world. However, most of the past studies only focused on the local or sample scale, with few studies having explored the effects of climate change on marsh vegetation over the whole China. The impacts of climate change on different types of vegetation in different marsh regions of China need to be further revealed.
A study led by Dr. SHEN Xiangjin from the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated for the first time the spatiotemporal change of marsh vegetation and its response to climate change over the whole China. The study was published online in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeoscienceson 03 February 2021.
Based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and climate data, this study investigated the spatiotemporal variation in vegetation and its response to climate change for different types of marshes in China from 2000 to 2019.
The study used the maximum value composite method to generate the original NDVI data into monthly data. Both the trend analysis and correlation analysis were used to analyze the spatiotemporal change of NDVI and the effect of climate change on NDVI in marshes of China.
The results indicated that the marshes NDVI in China has increased significantly in the past 20 years, especially in the east of Inner Mongolia and the southwest of Songnen Plain.
In the arid and semi-arid Inner Mongolia, increasing precipitation can significantly increase marsh NDVI of herbaceous marshes, marsh meadows, inland salt marshes, and seasonal saltwater marshes during the growing season.
This work first found asymmetric effects of day and night temperatures on marsh vegetation in China. Warming night-time temperature can significantly promote the growth of marsh vegetation in cold regions of the Tibet Plateau Northern and Northeast China. By contrast, the warming day-time temperature could inhibit the growth of marsh vegetation in arid and semi-arid region of eastern Inner Mongolia.
"Our results suggest that we should pay more attention to the different responses of vegetation to climate change for different marsh types, especially when we use the model to simulate the impact of climate change on vegetation in different marsh regions of China." said Dr. SHEN Xiangjin, corresponding author of the paper.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and National Key Research and Development Program of China.
Contact:
SHEN Xiangjin
Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
E-mail: shenxiangjin@iga.ac.cn
