Spatial-Temporal Variations of Active Accumulated Temperature and Its Impact on Vegetation NDVI in the Source Region of China’s Yellow River

Abstract

Global climate change has greatly influenced the ecosystems in the Tibetan Plateau. Many studies focused on the direct effects of climate warming on the headwater regions by mean temperature, while less investigating its implication for the eco-environment. To address this, the study discussed the spatial-temporal variations of the bio-related climate indicators ≥0 °C annual accumulated temperature AAT0 and its lasting days LDT0, and corresponding ≥5 °C indicators AAT5 and LDT5 on the source region of the Yellow River (SRYR). The stationarity of indicators during 1979–2018 were tested by Pettitt test, and trends checked by linear regression analysis and Mann-Kendall test. Normalized difference vegetation index NDVI (2001–2016) was adopted to detect the correlation between vegetation activities and indicators. Results show that the AAT and LDT0 exhibited significant increasing trend over the SRYR, while the LDT5 significantly increased mainly under 4000 m. Most LDT extended due to the combined efforts of the early onset and late termination of the given temperature. 1997 was detected in the abrupt change analysis of AAT0 both on the basin scale and most area, and was adopted to divide the period into two stages. The regional mean AAT0 linearly grew at a rate of 96 °C decade−1 during the entire period, and 104 °C decade−1 during the second stage. Except for a drastic jump in the areal mean values, there was a distinct upward-shift of isoline in elevation between stages. NDVI showed strong correlativity with ≥0 °C indicators on the basin scale, according to the Pearson, Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients, ranging from 0.5 to 0.7. Spatially, the overlap area between Pearson’s γ ≥ 0.5 and linearly rising AAT0 reached 50%, which was fully covered with significantly increasing AAT0 during the recent stage. Thus the rapid growth of ≥0 °C indicators would effectively accelerate NDVI over this major alpine grasslands, especially around the eastern low regions, where indicators are higher and grow faster.