22-year dynamic analysis of vegetation cover in karst area: a case study in Guangxi, China

作者：Guoqing Zhou, Xiao Zhou, Tian-Yi Song, Qu-Sheng Li, Yuefeng Wang, Hongchao Fan, Yufu Cai, Haiyang Zhi, Yongju Geng, Ziqi Zhang, Ertao Gao · 发表于：International Journal of Digital Earth · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1080/17538947.2025.2497097 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Remote Sensing and Land Use、Environmental Changes in China、Plant Ecology and Soil Science

Karst area usually suffered from dry duo to its thin soil thickness, resulting in a sparse vegetation cover than other areas’, further ecological unbalance. This paper investigates the changes in vegetation cover over 22 years (2001–2022) for Guangxi, the largest karst area globally. With MOD13Q1 data products, Theil–Sen trend analysis and Mann–Kendall tests are combinedly applied to investigate the spatial–temporal variations of NDVI vs. human activities and climate change. A long-term observation to vegetation coverage dynamics has discovered: (1) The NDVI in Guangxi generally showed an upward trend, averaging an annual growth rate of 0.0074, particularly in 2012. Spatially, 94.44% of the areas showed an improvement trend, while only 3.08% experienced degradation. (2) Human activities and climate change positively impacted NDVI changes, with land-use transformations playing a crucial role. Temperature had a greater impact than precipitation. (3) Human activities were responsible for 72.7% of the NDVI changes, demonstrating that they were the main driving factor. These findings have sufficiently demonstrated that the effective environmental protection policy made by local government is correct and the insights for the mechanisms of influencing vegetation changes discovered in this paper can be used for local government’s policy-making.