Processes and mechanisms of vegetation ecosystem responding to climate and ecological restoration in China

Vegetation is an essential component of the earth’s surface system and its dynamics is a clear indicator of global climate change. However, the vegetation trends of most studies were based on time-unvarying methods, cannot accurately detect the long-term nonlinear characteristics of vegetation changes. Here, the ensemble empirical mode decomposition and the Breaks for Additive Seasonal and Trend algorithm were applied to reconstruct the the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data and diagnose spatiotemporal evolution and abrupt changes of long-term vegetation trends in China during 1982–2018. Residual analysis was used to separate the influence of climate and human activities on NDVI variations, and the effect of specific human drivers on vegetation growth was obtained. The results suggest that based on the time-varying analysis, high vegetation browning was masked by overall vegetation greening. Vegetation growth in China experienced an abrupt change in the 1990s and 2000s, accounting for 50% and 33.6% of the whole China respectively. Of the area before the breakpoint, 45.4% showed a trend of vegetation decrease, which was concentrated mainly in east China, while 43% of the area after the breakpoint also showed vegetation degradation, mainly in northwest China. Climate was an important driving force for vegetation change in China. It played a positive role in south China, but had a negative effect in northwest China. The impact of human activities on vegetation growthchanged from an initial negative influence to a positive one. In terms of human activities, an inverted-U-shaped relation was detected between CO(2) emissions and vegetation growth; that is, the fertilization effect of CO(2) had a certain threshold. Once that threshold was exceeded, it would hinder vegetation growth. Population density had a slight constraint on vegetation growth, and the implementation of ecological restoration projects (e.g., the Grain for Green Program) can promote vegetation growth to a certain extent.