The global impact factors of net primary production in different land cover types from 2005 to 2011

Abstract

With the seriously polluted environment due to social development, the sustainability of net primary production (NPP), which is used to feed most lives on the earth, has become one of the biggest concerns that we have to consider for the sake of food shortage. There have been many researches analyzing one or two potential impact factors of NPP based on field observation data, which brings about many uncertainties for further calculation. Moreover, the frequently used process-based models heavily depend on the understandings of researchers about the NPP process. The premises of such models hinder the impact factor analysis from being objective and confident. To overcome such shortages, we collected 27 potential impact factors of global NPP in terms of eight land cover types. The feature variables include atmosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere and lithosphere parameters, which can be obtained from public available remote sensed products. The experiment shows that latitude, irradiance ultraviolet and normalized difference vegetation index are dominant factors impacting global NPP. Anthropogenic activities, precipitation and surface emissivity are influencing NPP calculation largely. However, some commonly used biosphere parameters in process-based models are actually not playing that important roles in NPP estimation. This work provides a new insight in analyzing NPP impact factors, being more objective and comprehensive compared with frequently used process-based models.