Remote Sensing Monitoring and Evaluation of Vegetation Changes in Hulun Buir Grassland, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China

Abstract

Constantly increasing vegetation changes pose serious challenges to the sustainable use of global ecosystems. Thus, facing the increasingly serious climate and ecological environment problems and improving vegetation coverage is crucial to the sustainable development of the region. Along these lines, in this work, a monitoring model of vegetation cover change was proposed and developed by using Landsat TM (1989, 1999, and 2011) and Landsat OLI-TIRS (2021) data. More specifically, it was used to assess vegetation change. Based on this model, the vegetation change in the core area of Hulun Buir Grassland was systematically analyzed., From the acquired results, the existence of spatial differences in the vegetation coverage changes in the study area were demonstrated. The total area of vegetation coverage changes was 758.95 km2, and the area from low vegetation coverage to high vegetation coverage was 456.41 km2, accounting for 60.14% of the total change area. The area from high vegetation coverage to low vegetation coverage was 302.57 km2, accounting for 39.86% of the total change area, whereas the area of the area without vegetation coverage was 1963.92 km2, accounting for 72.13% of the study area, and the overall vegetation coverage is improving. Vegetation cover change monitoring models can also be used to reveal and describe large-scale vegetation landscape changes and obtain clear vegetation change results through easy-to-obtain data; our work suggests that in the process of pursuing regional economic development and accelerating urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural modernization, human beings should assume more responsibilities and pursue the sustainable development of the natural environment. The results of this work are of great importance to further study the potential driving mechanism of the vegetation coverage changes and provide theoretical guidance for relevant managers to formulate vegetation restoration measures.