Quantitative Assessment of the Impact of Physical and Anthropogenic Factors on Vegetation Spatial-Temporal Variation in Northern Tibet

作者：Qinwei Ran, Yanbin Hao, Anquan Xia, Wenjun Liu, Ronghai Hu, Xiaoyong Cui, Kai Xue, Xiaoning Song, Cong Xu, Boyang Ding, Yanfen Wang · 发表于：Remote Sensing · 年份：2019 · DOI：10.3390/rs11101183 · 被引用次数：63 · 研究领域：Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology、Remote Sensing in Agriculture、Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

The alpine grassland on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau covers an area of about 1/3 of China’s total grassland area and plays a crucial role in regulating grassland ecological functions. Both environmental changes and irrational use of the grassland can result in severe grassland degradation in some areas of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. However, the magnitude and patterns of the physical and anthropogenic factors in driving grassland variation over northern Tibet remain debatable, and the interactive influences among those factors are still unclear. In this study, we employed a geographical detector model to quantify the primary and interactive impacts of both the physical factors (precipitation, temperature, sunshine duration, soil type, elevation, slope, and aspect) and the anthropogenic factors (population density, road density, residential density, grazing density, per capita GDP, and land use type) on vegetation variation from 2000 to 2015 in northern Tibet. Our results show that the vegetation index in northern Tibet significantly decreased from 2000 to 2015. Overall, the stability of vegetation types was sorted as follows: the alpine scrub > the alpine steppe > the alpine meadow. The physical factors, rather than the anthropogenic factors, have been the primary driving factors for vegetation dynamics in northern Tibet. Specifically, meteorological factors best explained the alpine meadow and alpine steppe variation. Precipitation was the key factor that influenced the al...