title: A probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of vegetation drought under varying climate conditions across China.
abstract: Climate change significantly impacts the vegetation growth and terrestrial ecosystems. Using satellite remote sensing observations, here we focus on investigating vegetation dynamics and the likelihood of vegetation-related drought under varying climate conditions across China. We first compare temporal trends of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and climatic variables over China. We find that in fact there is no significant change in vegetation over the cold regions where warming is significant. Then, we propose a joint probability model to estimate the likelihood of vegetation-related drought conditioned on different precipitation/temperature scenarios in growing season across China. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the vegetation-related drought risk over China from a perspective based on joint probability. Our results demonstrate risk patterns of vegetation-related drought under both low and high precipitation/temperature conditions. We further identify the variations in vegetation-related drought risk under different climate conditions and the sensitivity of drought risk to climate variability. These findings provide insights for decision makers to evaluate drought risk and vegetation-related develop drought mitigation strategies over China in a warming world. The proposed methodology also has a great potential to be applied for vegetation-related drought risk assessment in other regions worldwide.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg 69120, Germany.
authors.forename: Zhiyong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, California, USA.
authors.forename: Chao
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Guangzhou Institute of Geography, Guangzhou 510070, China.
authors.forename: Ping
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510650, China.
authors.forename: Xiuzhi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D002681:China; D057231:Climate Change; D055864:Droughts; D017753:Ecosystem; D063245:Plant Development / Q000502:physiology*; D010944:Plants; D011891:Rain; D063809:Satellite Imagery