Climate change weakened the productivity benefits from the forestry ecological engineering projects-induced greening in China

作者：Liang Zheng, Hao Wu, Anqi Lin, J. Lu, Xiaoling Chen · 发表于：International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1016/j.jag.2025.105052 · 研究领域：Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics、Forest Management and Policy、Agroforestry and silvopastoral systems

• Vegetation greenness and productivity trends were evaluated using NDVI and GPP. • Productivity showed a weaker growth trend than greenness. • An improved residual trend method with trend turning points quantified ecological project effects. • Ecological projects enhanced greenness but could not offset climate-driven productivity decline. To enhance ecosystem functioning and terrestrial carbon sink capacity, the Chinese government has implemented a series of regional ecological projects. However, the effectiveness of ecological projects varies considerably due to regional climate differences and diverse implementation strategies. This study analyzed long-term time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) from 1982 to 2018 across eight Forestry Ecological Engineering Projects (FEEPs) and is the first to combine Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) with a modified residual trend analysis to quantify the contributions of these projects to vegetation greenness and productivity. The results indicate that both NDVI and GPP exhibited overall increasing trends in FEEP regions, although GPP exhibited lower magnitude and stability (with a monotonically increasing of about 35 % of pixels) than NDVI (with a monotonically increasing of about 54 % of pixels). GPP was more sensitive to environmental changes, with the proportions of pixels significantly correlated with temperature, precipitation, and sunlight being 74.0 %, 59.0...