An improved global vegetation health index dataset in detecting vegetation drought

Jingyu Zeng; Tao Zhou; Yanping Qu; Virgílio A Bento; Junyu Qi; Yixin Xu; Ying Li; Qianfeng Wang

doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02255-3

An improved global vegetation health index dataset in detecting vegetation drought

Sci Data. 2023 May 31;10(1):338. doi: 10.1038/s41597-023-02255-3.

Authors

Jingyu Zeng^{1

2}, Tao Zhou¹, Yanping Qu³, Virgílio A Bento⁴, Junyu Qi⁵, Yixin Xu¹, Ying Li^{1

6}, Qianfeng Wang⁷

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disasters of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
² College of Environment & Safety Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350116, China.
³ Research Center on Flood and Drought Disaster Reduction, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing, 100038, China.
⁴ Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, Instituto Dom Luiz, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal.
⁵ Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, 5825 University Research Ct, College Park, MD, 20740, USA.
⁶ Zhejiang Institute of Meteorological Sciences, Hangzhou, 310008, China.
⁷ College of Environment & Safety Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350116, China. wangqianfeng@fzu.edu.cn.

Abstract

Due to global warming, drought events have become more frequent, which resulted in aggravated crop failures, food shortage, larger and more energetic wildfires, and have seriously affected socio-economic development and agricultural production. In this study, a global long-term (1981-2021), high-resolution (4 km) improved vegetation health index (VHI) dataset integrating climate, vegetation and soil moisture was developed. Based on drought records from the Emergency Event Database, we compared the detection efficiency of the VHI before and after its improvement in the occurrence and scope of observed drought events. The global drought detection efficiency of the improved high-resolution VHI dataset reached values as high as 85%, which is 14% higher than the original VHI dataset. The improved VHI dataset was also more sensitive to mild droughts and more accurate regarding the extent of droughts. This improved dataset can play an important role in long-term drought monitoring but also has the potential to assess the impact of drought on the agricultural, forestry, ecological and environmental sectors.

Publication types

Dataset

Abstract

Publication types

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