4.5 Article

Comparative assessment of grassland degradation dynamics in response to climate variation and human activities in China, Mongolia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan from 2000 to 2013

Journal

JOURNAL OF ARID ENVIRONMENTS
Volume 135, Issue -, Pages 164-172

Publisher

ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaridenv.2016.09.004

Keywords

Grassland degradation; Climate variation; Human activities; Net primary productivity (NPP); Quantitative assessment

Funding

  1. APN Global Change Fund Project [ARCP2015-03CMY-Li, CAF2015-RR14-NMY-Odeh]
  2. Jiangsu Province Agricultural Three Renovations Project of China [SXGC [2014]287]
  3. The National Natural Science Foundation of China [41271361]
  4. Key Project of Chinese National Programs for Fundamental Research and Development (973 Program) [2010CB950702]
  5. The National High Technology Project (863 Plan) [2007AA10Z231]
  6. Australian Agency for International Development (PSLP) [64828]

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Quantifying the driving force is significant to understand the impact of climate variation and human activities on grassland degradation. In this study, we selected net primary productivity (NPP) as an indicator to quantitatively assess the relative roles of climate variation and human activities in China, Mongolia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan from 2000 to 2013. The results showed that 1.9% of grassland areas experienced degradation in Uzbekistan. By contrast, 29.6%, 16%, and 32.5% of grassland areas underwent restoration in China, Mongolia and Pakistan, respectively. Furthermore, 83.9%, 85.1%, 6.7% of restored grassland areas were influenced by climate variation and 65%, 79.1%, 11.6% of degraded areas were affected by human activities in Mongolia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, respectively. The NPP variation also could be calculated to evaluate the impacts of these factors and results were consistent with the findings based on area. Therefore, climate variation dominated grassland restoration, human activities dominated degradation in Mongolia and Pakistan, and Uzbekistan was just the opposite. In China, 38.5% of the grassland restoration areas was caused by climate variations compared with 38% induced by human activities. On the contrary, 37.4% of grassland degradation was caused by climate variation and 30% resulted from human activities. In addition, the results based on NPP variation revealed that 39.2% of restored grassland areas were influenced by human activities and 38.2% of degraded areas were affected by climate variation. Therefore, climate variation dominated grassland degradation and the driving force of restoration was determined by the effectiveness of environmental protection programs. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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