Probabilistic assessment of vegetation vulnerability to drought stress in Central Asia

Ye Yuan; Anming Bao; Ping Jiang; Rafiq Hamdi; Piet Termonia; Philippe De Maeyer; Hao Guo; Guoxiong Zheng; Tao Yu; Alexander V Prishchepov

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114504

Probabilistic assessment of vegetation vulnerability to drought stress in Central Asia

J Environ Manage. 2022 May 15:310:114504. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114504. Epub 2022 Feb 18.

Authors

Ye Yuan¹, Anming Bao², Ping Jiang³, Rafiq Hamdi⁴, Piet Termonia⁵, Philippe De Maeyer⁶, Hao Guo⁷, Guoxiong Zheng⁸, Tao Yu¹, Alexander V Prishchepov⁹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China; Department of Geography, Ghent University, Ghent, 9000, Belgium.
² State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China; Sino-Belgian Laboratory for Geo-Information, Urumqi, 83011, China; Key Laboratory of GIS & RS Application Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Urumqi, 830011, China; China-Pakistan Joint Research Center on Earth Sciences, CAS-HEC, Islamabad, 45320, Pakistan. Electronic address: baoam@ms.xjb.ac.cn.
³ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China; Royal Meteorological Institute, Brussels, Belgium; Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
⁵ Royal Meteorological Institute, Brussels, Belgium; Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
⁶ Department of Geography, Ghent University, Ghent, 9000, Belgium; Sino-Belgian Laboratory for Geo-Information, Ghent, 9000, Belgium.
⁷ School of Geography and Tourism, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao, 276800, China.
⁸ State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
⁹ Department of Geosciences and NaturalResource Management (IGN), University of Copenhagen, København K, 1350, Denmark; Department of Theoretical Cybernetics and Applied Mathematics, Institute of Mathematics and Information Technologies, Altai State University, Lenina 61, 656049, Barnaul, Russia.

PMID: 35189553
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114504

Abstract

The increasing frequency and intensity of droughts in a warming climate are likely to exacerbate adverse impacts on ecosystems, especially for water-limited regions such as Central Asia. A quantitative understanding of the impacts of drought on vegetation is required for drought preparedness and mitigation. Using the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies NDVI3g data and Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) from 1982 to 2015, we evaluate the vegetation vulnerability to drought in Central Asia based on a copula-based probabilistic framework and identify the critical regions and periods. Furthermore, a boosted regression trees (BRT) model was also used to explore the relative importance of environmental factors and plant traits on vegetation response to drought. Additionally, we also investigated to what extent irrigation could alleviate the impacts of drought. Results revealed that months from June to September was the critical period when vegetated areas were most vulnerable to drought stress. The probabilities of vegetation loss below 20th quantile under extremely dry in these months were 68.7%, 69.4%, 71.0%, and 67.0%, respectively. Regarding vegetation-vulnerable regions, they shifted with different growth stages. During the middle of the growing season, semi-arid areas were the most vulnerable regions, whereas the highest drought-vulnerable regions were observed in arid areas during other periods. The BRT results showed that plant traits accounted for a large fraction (58.9%) of vegetation response to drought, which was more important than ambient soil environment (20.8%). The analysis also showed that mitigations from irrigation during July to September were smaller than in other months. The results of this paper provide insight into the influences of drought on vegetation and may contribute to drought mitigation and land degradation measures in Central Asia under accelerating global warming.

Keywords: Central asia; Copula method; Drought; SPEI; Vegetation vulnerability.

MeSH terms

Asia
Climate Change
Droughts*
Ecosystem*
Plants*
Seasons