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Aboveground net primary productivity of vegetation along a climate-related gradient in a Eurasian temperate grassland: spatiotemporal patterns and their relationships with climate factors

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Abstract

Accurate assessments of spatiotemporal patterns in net primary productivity and their links to climate are important to obtain a deeper understanding of the function, stability and sustainability of grassland ecosystems. We combined a satellite-derived NDVI time-series dataset and field-based samples to investigate spatiotemporal patterns in aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP), and we examined the effect of growing season air temperate (GST) and precipitation (GSP) on these patterns along a climate-related gradient in an eastern Eurasian grassland. Our results indicated that the ANPP fluctuated with no significant trend during 2001–2012. The spatial distribution of ANPP was heterogeneous and decreased from northeast to southwest. The interannual changes in ANPP were mainly controlled by year-to-year GSP; a strong correlation of interannual variability between ANPP and GSP was observed. Similarly, GSP strongly influenced spatial variations in ANPP, and the slopes of fitted linear functions of the GSP–ANPP relationship increased from arid temperate desert grassland to humid meadow grassland. An exponential function could be used to fit the GSP–ANPP relationship for the entire region. An improved moisture index that combines the effects of GST and GSP better explained the variations in ANPP compared with GSP alone. In comparisons with the previous studies, we found that the relationships between spatiotemporal variations in ANPP and climate factors were probably scale dependent. We imply that the quantity and spatial range of analyzed samples contribute to these different results. Multi-scale studies are necessary to improve our knowledge of the response of grassland ANPP to climate change.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31372354, 41571105) and International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China (2013DFR30760). We thank the Grassland Monitoring and Supervision Center of the Ministry of Agriculture for providing the ground truth data. We are also grateful to Dr. Jiaojun Zhu for providing constructive suggestions on a draft of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China

    Tian Gao & Xiao Zheng

  2. Key Laboratory of Agri-Informatics, Ministry of Agriculture/Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 12 Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing, China

    Tian Gao, Bin Xu, Xiuchun Yang, Hailong Ma, Haida Yu & Qiangyi Yu

  3. Qingyuan Forest CERN, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China

    Tian Gao

  4. Institute of Mountain Science, Shinshu University, Nagano, Japan

    Songqiu Deng

  5. Chinese Academy of Agricultural Engineering, Beijing, China

    Yuechen Liu

  6. Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yunxiang Jin

  7. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jinya Li

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  1. Tian Gao
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Correspondence to Bin Xu.

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Gao, T., Xu, B., Yang, X. et al. Aboveground net primary productivity of vegetation along a climate-related gradient in a Eurasian temperate grassland: spatiotemporal patterns and their relationships with climate factors. Environ Earth Sci 76, 56 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-016-6158-4

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