Characterizing Drought Effects on Vegetation Productivity in the Four Corners Region of the US Southwest
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Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Dept Biosyst EngnUniv Arizona, Sch Nat Resources & Environm, Arizona Remote Sensing Ctr
Univ Arizona, Dept Soils Water & Environm Sci
Issue Date
2018-05
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EL-Vilaly MAS, Didan K, Marsh SE, Crimmins MA, Munoz AB. Characterizing Drought Effects on Vegetation Productivity in the Four Corners Region of the US Southwest. Sustainability. 2018; 10(5):1643.Journal
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© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.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
The droughts striking the Colorado Plateau, where the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation Native American reservation lands are located, and their impacts have appeared slowly and relatively unnoticed in conventional national drought monitoring efforts like the National Drought Monitor. To understand the effect of drought-based drivers on vegetation productivity in the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation reservation lands, an assessment approach was developed integrating climate, land cover types, and topographical data with annual geospatially explicit normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-related productivity from 1989 to 2014 derived from 15-day composite multi-sensor NDVI time series data. We studied vegetation-environment relationships by conducting multiple linear regression analysis to explain the driver of vegetation productivity changes. Our results suggest that the interannual change of vegetation productivity showed high variability in middle elevations where needleleaf forest is the dominant vegetation cover type. Our analysis also shows that the spatial variation in interannual variability of vegetation productivity was more driven by climate drivers than by topography ones. Specifically, the interannual variability in spring precipitation and fall temperature seems to be the most significant factor that correlated with the interannual variability in vegetation productivity during the last two and a half decades.Note
Open Access Journal.ISSN
2071-1050Version
Final published versionSponsors
NASA EOS-MODIS [NNX14AI74G, 80NSSC18K0617]; NASA S-NPP-VIIRS [NNX14AP69A]; NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program [NA10OAR4310183]Additional Links
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/5/1643ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3390/su10051643
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.