VEGETATION DYNAMICS AND THEIR RELATIONS WITH CLIMATE CHANGE AT SEASONAL SCALES IN THE YANGTZE RIVER BASIN, CHINA

Knowledge on vegetation dynamics and its response to climate change is important for the sustainability of natural resources and understanding the changes in the ecosystems and its impact on the Earth's environment. We have carried out an analysis of GIMIVIS (Global inventory modelling and mapping studies) NDVI3g (third generation normalized difference vegetation data), daily temperature (T) and precipitation (P) for the 1982-2015 period based on Linear Regression (LR) analysis, the Mann-Kendall (MK) test with Sen's slope estimator and Kriging interpolation method. We have investigated the spatiotemporal variations of NDVI and climatic factors in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB), China The relationship between NDVI and climatic factors was also analyzed quantitatively. The results show that the mean NDVI has an increasing trend in all four seasons during 1982-2015, the increasing trend during spring and autumn seasons was higher compared to winter and summer seasons. The response of vegetation dynamics to temperature was more prominent than precipitation. The correlation analysis shows that the mean NDVI had a significant and positive correlation with seasonal temperature, and the correlation coefficients were the highest during spring, followed by winter, summer and autumn seasons.