Aridification in a farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China from 2 perspectives: Climate and soil

Guoliang Zhang; Xin Chen; Yi Zhou; Li Jiang; Yuling Jin; Yukai Wei; Yunpeng Li; Zhihua Pan; Pingli An

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114070

Aridification in a farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China from 2 perspectives: Climate and soil

J Environ Manage. 2022 Jan 15;302(Pt B):114070. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114070. Epub 2021 Nov 12.

Authors

Guoliang Zhang¹, Xin Chen¹, Yi Zhou¹, Li Jiang¹, Yuling Jin¹, Yukai Wei¹, Yunpeng Li², Zhihua Pan³, Pingli An⁴

Affiliations

¹ College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, 100193, China; Key Laboratory of Land Quality, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, 100193, China.
² Ecological and Agricultural Meteorology Center of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 010051, China.
³ College of Resources and Environmental Science, China Agricultural University, Beijing, 100193, China.
⁴ College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, 100193, China; Key Laboratory of Land Quality, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, 100193, China. Electronic address: anpl@cau.edu.cn.

PMID: 34775336
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114070

Abstract

Understanding the impact of climate change on terrestrial wet and dry changes and the relationship between the two is of great significance to the sustainable development of terrestrial ecosystems. The farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China (FPENC) is an area that is sensitive to climate change, suffering from perennial drought and a clear aridification trend. Unlike previous single-factor, single-timescale studies, we identified aridification in the region based on a dataset established by remote sensing and ground-based monitoring stations from a combination of two perspectives: climate and soil. The results show that, in terms of climate, the period from 2000 to 2019 was the driest in the region during the last 120 years , and the summer drought was the most severe and shifted from a summer to spring drought; in terms of soil, the soil aridification trend in the region was severe, with 16.1% of the areas becoming significantly drier (P < 0.1) among the years and 41.6% in spring, respectively. Similar to climate change, soils exhibited recessive aridification due to the counterbalancing effect of the dry and wet seasons within the year. Then the coupling relationship between climate change and soil aridification was established in time and space. Moreover, the spatiotemporal response patterns of both were obtained. The results showed that the frequency of soil drought under meteorological drought conditions showed an increasing trend and that the sensitivity of soil drought occurrence increased. Among them, the effect of precipitation on relative soil moisture (RSM) was immediate, and the effect of prolonged warming on RSM is greater. The area of soil aridification that was caused by climatic aridification in spring accounted for 13.7% of the entire area. The regional aridification research mode proposed in this paper can provide ideas for subsequent studies.

Keywords: Abnormal drought; Central part of the farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China; Climate change; Soil aridification; Spatial and temporal relationships; Temperature vegetation dryness index.

MeSH terms

Agriculture
China
Climate Change
Ecosystem*
Soil*

Substances

Soil