Remote sensing greenness and urbanization in ecohydrological model analysis: Asia and Australasia (1982-2015)

Abstract

Linking remote sensing information and ecohydrological models to improve understanding of terrestrial biosphere responses to climate and land use change has become the subject of increased interest due to the impacts of current global changes and the effect on the sustainability of human lifestyles. An application to Asia and Australasia (1982-2015) is presented, revealing the following results: (i) The broad distribution of regions with the enhanced vegetation greenness only follows the general pattern as for the whole, without obvious dependence on regional or climate fluxes ratios. That indicates a prevailing increasing greenness over land due to both the impacts of current global changes and the sustainability of human lifestyles; (ii) regions with vegetation greenness reduction reveal a unique distribution, concentrating in the water-limited domain due to the impacts of external (climatically “dry gets drier and wet gets wetter”) and internal (anthropogenically increased evaporation) changes; (iii) the external changes of dryness diverge at the boundary separating energy from water-limited regimes, and the internal changes indicate large-scale afforestation and deforestation) that occur mainly in China and Russia due to a conservation program and illegal logging, respectively, and a massive conversion of tropical forest to industrial tree plantations in Southeast Asia, leading to an increased evaporation.