title: Empirical Evidence for Impacts of Internal Migration on Vegetation Dynamics in China from 1982 to 2000.
abstract: Migration is one of the major socio-economic characteristics of China since the country adopted the policy of economic reform in late 1970s. Many studies have been dedicated to understand why and how people move, and the consequences of their welfare. The purpose of this study is to investigate the environmental impacts of the large scale movement of population in China. We analyzed the trend in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) along with China migration data from the 1 percent national survey during 1982-1987, the 4thnational census during 1985-1990 and the 5thnational census during1995~2000. We found that the internal migration in China has a statistically significant negative impact on vegetation growth at the provincial scale from 1982 to 2000 even though the overall vegetation abundance increased in China. The impact from migration (R²=0.47, P=0.0001) on vegetation dynamics is the second strongest as among the factors considered, including changes in annual mean air temperature (R²=0.50, P=0.0001) and annual total precipitation (R²=0.30, P=0.0049) and gross domestic production (R²= 0.25, P=0.0102). The negative statistical relationship between the rate of increase in total migration and the change in vegetation abundance is stronger (R²=0.56, P=0.0000) after controlling for the effects of changes in temperature and precipitation. In-migration dominates the impacts of migration on vegetation dynamics. Therefore, it is important for policy makers in China to take the impacts of migration on vegetation growth into account while making policies aiming at sustainable humanenvironment relations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. csong@email.unc.edu.
authors.forename: Conghe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. jacksonlord@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jackson W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Lord
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA. lmzhou@eas.gatech.edu.
authors.forename: Liming
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Department of Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, State College, PA 16802, USA. jing@psu.edu.
authors.forename: Jingfeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Xiao
keywords: China; Human-Environment Interactions; NDVI; Rural-to-Urban Migration