Fractional monitoring of desert vegetation degradation, recovery, and greening using optimized multi-endmembers spectral mixture analysis in a dryland basin of Northwest China

Accurate identification of desert vegetation dynamics in arid regions is challenging because of its complex composition of grass species, obscure boundary with non-desert vegetation, and high sensitiveness to climatic variations. This study examined the ability of optimized multi-endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) for monitoring desert vegetation degradation, recovery, and greening in a dryland basin of Northwest China using Landsat time series data from the 1990s to 2016. Eight modeled endmember fractions were generated using the best endmember model with the lowest fraction error and root mean square error (RMSE). Abundances of non-desert vegetation, desert vegetation, soil, and impervious surface areas were incorporated based on the eight original fractions and validated using high spatial resolution images. Finally, the post-classification comparison approach was used to detect desert vegetation degradation, recovery, and greening. Results show that: (1) More than 97% of the land pixels were modeled successfully into eight endmember fractions for each period with the mean RMSE less than 0.01. All four simulated abundances had high correlations (r = 0.89-0.96) with the corresponding reference data, indicating good performance of MESMA in this study; (2) Desert vegetation increased dramatically (772.68 km(2)) during the 26-year period. The major change was desert vegetation recovery with a total area of 10,705 km(2), followed by degradation with a total area of 4,715 km(2). The greening area was the smallest, covering only 1,509 km(2); (3) Increased precipitation was the major contributor for desert vegetation greening in the west of upper region while decreased precipitation was the major contributor for the degradation in the west of lower region. Anthropogenic factors (e.g., improvement of irrigation, crop expansion) were major contributors for the change in desert vegetation in the middle region. This research demonstrates that MESMA is promising in detecting desert vegetation dynamics in semi-arid and arid regions.

Automated summary

The study successfully monitored the dynamics of desert vegetation in a dryland basin of Northwest China using MESMA method. Results showed areas of degradation, recovery, and greening, and analyzed different influencing factors, demonstrating the potential application of this method in semi-arid and arid regions.