Abstract
For more than a decade, the Four Corners Region has faced extensive and persistent drought conditions that have impacted vegetation communities and local water resources while exacerbating soil erosion. These persistent droughts threaten ecosystem services, agriculture, and livestock activities, and expose the hypersensitivity of this region to inter-annual climate variability and change. Much of the intermountainWestern United States has sparse climate and vegetation monitoring stations, making fine-scale drought assessments difficult. Remote sensing data offers the opportunity to assess the impacts of the recent droughts on vegetation productivity across these areas. Here, we propose a drought assessment approach that integrates climate and topographical data with remote sensing vegetation index time series. Multisensor Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series data from 1989 to 2010 at 5.6 km were analyzed to characterize the vegetation productivity changes and responses to the ongoing drought. A multi-linear regression was applied to metrics of vegetation productivity derived from the NDVI time series to detect vegetation productivity, an ecosystem service proxy, and changes. The results show that around 60.13% of the study area is observing a general decline of greenness (p<0.05), while 3.87% show an unexpected green up, with the remaining areas showing no consistent change. Vegetation in the area show a significant positive correlation with elevation and precipitation gradients. These results, while, confirming the region’s vegetation decline due to drought, shed further light on the future directions and challenges to the region’s already stressed ecosystems. Whereas the results provide additional insights into this isolated and vulnerable region, the drought assessment approach used in this study may be adapted for application in other regions where surface-based climate and vegetation monitoring record is spatially and temporally limited.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by NASA (Grant No. NNX11AG56G) and NASA MEaSUREs (Grant No. NNX08AT05A) (Kamel Didan, PI) and the NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program (NA10OAR4310183) (Michael Crimmins, PI). We also thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable and constructive comments.
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Mohamed Abd Salam El-Vilaly received a B.Sc. in water resources management from the University of Nouakchott, Mauritania in 2001, M.Sc. degree in hydrology from the University of Avignon, France in 2004, and a Ph.D. degrees in Arid Lands Resource Sciences from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 2013. Dr. Abd-Salam is a Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA. He has worked over 16 years in the humanitarian, academic, and private sectors. His major areas of specialization include hydrology, groundwater extraction, and the use of Geographic Information Science (GIS) & Remote Sensing for monitoring ecological change at a global scale. Specifically, Abd Salam’s work focuses on human-environment interactions related to resource access, natural hazards, and human and animal health.
Kamel Didan received the B.Sc. from the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Tunis, Tunisia, in 1988, M.Sc. and Ph. D. in 1991 and 1999 respectively, from the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (ABE), University of Arizona, Tucson. He is currently an Associate Professor in the ABE Department, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, where he directs the Vegetation Index and Phenology Laboratory that specializes in long term multi-sensor global remote sensing and the development of algorithms for generating time series data in support of global change studies. This work intersects the concepts of big data analytics, precision agriculture and mapping, and the development of online big data tools. Prof. Didan is a member of the American Geophysical Union and IEEE Geosciences and Remote Sensing Society. He received the NASA Certificate of Recognition for Services and Contribution to the EOS program and serves on multiple NASA Earth science working groups.
Stuart E. Marsh received the B.S. degree (1973) in Geology from George Washington University, Washington, DC, and the M.S. (1975) and Ph.D. (1979) degrees in applied earth sciences from Stanford University, Stanford, California. Professor Marsh joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1988. Prior to coming to the UA he held positions in industry and the federal government. Dr. Stuart is Director of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona. He served as Chair of the Arid Lands Resource Sciences Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program for 10 years (2002‒2012) and on the Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs Advisory Committee (GIDPAC) from 2007 through 2010. He also served as Director of the Arizona Remote Sensing Center from 2004 through 2011. Dr. Marsh was a recipient of a J. William Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, multiple awards from the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, NASA, and the USDA. His research focuses on the integration and analysis of multitemporal airborne and satellite remote sensing data with GIS technologies to map and monitor environmental change. He has worked on mapping land-cover change in environmentally sensitive areas of Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, and the U.S. This work helped to create new techniques to map land-cover change at global scales, develop rule-based and geostatistical models of vegetation distribution under varying climatic regimes, and evaluate the environmental impacts of landcover change within arid environments and urban riparian and rural/urban fringe habitats.
Willem J.D. van Leeuwen received the B. Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Soil Science from the Wageningen University for Life Sciences, the Netherlands in 1985 and 1987 respectively, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science, University of Arizona, Tucson in 1995. Dr. Willem is an Associate Professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment & the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He has more than 20 years of remote sensing science experience and is the director of the Arizona Remote Sensing Center at the University of Arizona. His research interests focus on multi-platform remote sensing data fusion and product development for resource monitoring, management and decision making. Dr. van Leeuwen is a member of the American Geophysical Union, Association of American Geographers and Ecological Society of America.
Michael A. Crimmins received a B.Sc. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Michigan in 1996, a M.Sc. in Geography from Western Michigan University in 1998 and Ph.D. in Geography with a focus on climatology from the University of Arizona in 2004. Dr. Crimmins is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Sciences and has been in this position since 2005. His research expertise focuses on applied climate research in arid regions including the southwest U.S. studying climate extremes from droughts to floods. As an Extension Specialist he works with resource managers, agricultural producers, and decision makers to use climate information and applied climate research to support decision making, planning and management. Dr. Crimmins is a member of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society.
Armando Barreto Munoz received a M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona, Tucson AZ USA, in 2006 and 2013 respectively. Dr. Barreto has more than 8 years of remote sensing science experience developing algorithms for spatial data processing and creating online applications at the Vegetation Index and Phenology Laboratory at the University of Arizona. His research interest focus on long term data records from multiple platforms, data quality analysis, and production of vegetation indices and phenology datasets. Dr. Barreto is a member of the American Geophysical Union and NASA MODIS/VIIRS land science team.
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El-Vilaly, M.A.S., Didan, K., Marsh, S.E. et al. Vegetation productivity responses to drought on tribal lands in the four corners region of the Southwest USA. Front. Earth Sci. 12, 37–51 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-017-0646-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-017-0646-z