Effects of Land Cover Change on Vegetation Carbon Source/Sink in Arid Terrestrial Ecosystems of Northwest China, 2001–2018

作者：Haiyang Tu, Guli Jiapaer, Yu Tao, Liancheng Zhang, Bojian Chen, Kaixiong Lin, Xu Li · 发表于：Remote Sensing · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.3390/rs15092471 · 被引用次数：26 · 研究领域：Land Use and Ecosystem Services、Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics、Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics

The arid terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle is one of the most important parts of the global carbon cycle, but it is vulnerable to external disturbances. As the most direct factor affecting the carbon cycle, how land cover change affects vegetation carbon sources/sinks in arid terrestrial ecosystems remains unclear. In this study, we chose the arid region of northwest China (ARNWC) as the study area and used net ecosystem productivity (NEP) as an indicator of vegetation carbon source/sink. Subsequently, we described the spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of vegetation carbon sources/sinks in the ARNWC from 2001–2018 by combining the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) and a soil microbial heterotrophic respiration (RH) model and assessed the effects of land cover change on them through modeling scenario design. We found that land cover change had an obvious positive impact on vegetation carbon sinks. Among them, the effect of land cover type conversion contributed to an increase in total NEP of approximately 1.77 Tg C (reaching 15.55% of the original value), and after simultaneously considering the effect of vegetation growth enhancement, it contributed to an increase in total NEP of approximately 14.75 Tg C (reaching 129.61% of the original value). For different land cover types, cropland consistently contributed the most to the increment of NEP, and the regeneration of young and middle-aged forests also led to a significant increase in forest carbon sinks. Thus, ...