Divergent responses of vegetation cover in Southwestern US ecosystems to dry and wet years at different elevations
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Herrmann_2016_Environ._Res._Le ...
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Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Agr & Biosyst EngnUniv Arizona, Soil Water & Environm Sci
Issue Date
2016-12-01
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Divergent responses of vegetation cover in Southwestern US ecosystems to dry and wet years at different elevations 2016, 11 (12):124005 Environmental Research LettersJournal
Environmental Research LettersRights
Copyright © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
In the semiarid Southwestern United States, prolonged drought conditions since the early 2000s have resulted in widespread declines of the vegetation productivity in this water-constrained ecosystem, as revealed by analyses of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). However, the spatial pattern of the NDVI response to dry years is not uniform: a divergent response of NDVI to precipitation is observed between the low-lying desert and the high montane forests at elevations above 2,500 meter. Weanalyzed relationships between 15 years of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI and gridded climate data (PRISM) along elevation gradients at scales from regional to local. Our elevation-explicit analysis captures the transition from water-limited to temperature-limited ecosystems, with a sign-reversal in the correlation coefficient between precipitation and NDVI observed at about 2,500-3,000m altitude. Wesuggest warmer temperatures and less snow cover associated with drier years as explanations for high elevation gains in vegetation productivity during dry years.ISSN
1748-9326Version
Final published versionSponsors
NASA EOS-MODIS grant [NNX14AI74G]; NASA S-NPP-VIIRS [NNX14AP69A]Additional Links
http://stacks.iop.org/1748-9326/11/i=12/a=124005?key=crossref.99561a7d463671dd7dcc920e8584a756ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124005
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Copyright © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.