Vegetation response to changes in temperature, rainfall, and dust in arid environments
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Vegetation response to changes in temperature, rainfall, and dust in arid environments Zohre Ebrahimi-Khusfi & Maryam Mirakbari & Mohammad Khosroshahi
Received: 9 June 2020 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Climate change is responsible for changes in the world’s vegetation. This study was aimed to investigate the effect of long-term variations in the air temperature, precipitation, and dust concentration on normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) variations in the spring, summer, and growing season over arid regions of Iran. The results showed that the precipitation had a positive association with the NDVI in the spring and growing seasons (β > + 0.28; P < 0.05), while air temperature had a negative relationship with the NDVI changes in these seasons (β > − 0.34; P = 0.013). Our results also showed a negative relationship between the accumulated dust concentration (ADC) and NDVI in the spring (β = − 0.23; P = 0.09) and growing seasons (β = − 0.24; P = 0.003). Spatially, the strongest linkage between NDVI and climatic variables was observed in about two-thirds of the study region. In total, our findings indicate that the use of dust concentration, air temperature, and precipitation helps us to make a more accurate approach for evaluating the impacts of climate
Z. Ebrahimi-Khusfi (*) Department of Natural Science, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Jiroft, Jiroft, Iran e-mail: [email protected] M. Mirakbari Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected] M. Khosroshahi Forestry and Rangeland Research Institute of Iran, Agricultural Research and Development Organization, Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected]
change on vegetation variations in the arid environments. Keywords Air quality . Remote sensing . Wind erosion . Accumulated dust concentration . Sensitive areas . Middle East
Introduction Vegetation is one of the most important physical parameters of the earth’s surface that plays an important role in protecting the soil and reduces the adverse effects of water and wind erosion (Kim et al. 2017; Song et al. 2019; Youssef et al. 2012). Understanding how vegetation behaves in response to climate change is a serious challenge, as their ability for absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2) and soil conservation are largely influenced by climate factors (Althoff et al. 2016; Chen et al. 2019; Frouz 2020). Uneven spatial distribution of rainfall and prolonged droughts are the most important characteristics of arid and semi-arid regions (Nabaei et al. 2019; Pour et al. 2020; Sharafati et al. 2020). These properties affect soil moisture content, vegetation density, and land surface temperature (Jha and Srivastava 2018; Rebello et al. 2020; Speranza et al. 2010). Furthermore, abiotic soil features also affect the vegetation conditions in different geographical areas (Wamelink et al. 2018). Vegetation development can reduce flow velocity in floodplains (Ahmad et al. 2020), increase the protection of riversi
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