Greening of human-dominated ecosystems in India

Satellite data show the Earth has been greening and identify croplands in India as one of the most prominent greening hotspots. Though India’s agriculture has been dependent on irrigation enhancement to reduce crop water stress and increase production, the spatiotemporal dynamics of how irrigation influenced the satellite observed greenness remains unclear. Here, we use satellite-derived leaf area data and survey-based agricultural statistics together with results from state-of-the-art Land Surface Models (LSM) to investigate the role of irrigation in the greening of India’s croplands. We find that satellite observations provide multiple lines of evidence showing strong contributions of irrigation to significant greening during dry season and in drier environments. The national statistics support irrigation-driven yield enhancement and increased dry season cropping intensity. These suggest a continuous shift in India’s agriculture toward an irrigation-driven dry season cropping system and confirm the importance of land management in the greening phenomenon. However, the LSMs identify CO2 fertilization as a primary driver of greening whereas land use and management have marginal impacts on the simulated leaf area changes. This finding urges a closer collaboration of the modeling, Earth observation, and land system science communities to improve representation of land management in the Earth system modeling. Satellite-derived leaf area and survey-based agricultural data indicate that dry season irrigation contributes to India’s greening, however land surface models struggle to accurately reproduce the greening trend and its drivers.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Communications Earth & Environment

• Publication date

  2023-11-27

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s43247-023-01078-9PMID 38665186PMCID 11041707
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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