SCIENCE@home

Vegetation greening and driving factors in the Eurasian drylands under sustained drought conditions over recent two decades.

Jinyue Liu,Chao Yue,Fan Yi,Pengyi Zhang,Junhao He,Jie Zhao

Published 2025 in Journal of Environmental Management

ABSTRACT

Eurasian drylands constitute the largest contiguous arid and semi-arid region globally, where the ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to environmental changes and anthropogenic activities, posing threats to the sustainability of the regional vegetation. Therefore, quantifying vegetation dynamics and identifying their driving factors is crucial in environmental management and regulation. In this study, we evaluated the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation and their underlying drivers across Eurasian drylands during 2003-2020. The results show that the satellite-derived leaf area index (LAI) and gross primary production (GPP) exhibited consistently significant increasing trends. Conversely, soil moisture and terrestrial water storage declined over the same period, while significant increasing trends were found in temperature and vapor pressure deficit. Precipitation and surface net solar radiation showed non-significant increasing trends. Attribution analysis show that, irrespective of CO2 fertilization effect, both environmental factors and anthropogenic activities contributed positively to vegetation greening, with anthropogenic activities playing the dominant role. Among the environmental drivers, water availability was identified as the most influential factor, accounting for over 50 % of the increase in vegetation greening. The reported overwhelming anthropogenic effect on regional vegetation greening, despite regional drying trend, raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of these ecosystems under future climate change. Therefore, close monitoring and early alerts regarding vegetation growth are imperative for the sustainable management of Eurasian dryland ecosystems.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-72 of 72 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY