Satellite observations of high northern latitude vegetation productivity changes between 1982 and 2008: ecological variability and regional differences

By Pieter S. A. Beck, Scott J. Goetz. 2011

357 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To assess ongoing changes in high latitude vegetation productivity we compared spatiotemporal patterns in remotely sensed vegetation productivity in the tundra and boreal zones of North America and Eurasia. We compared the long-term GIMMS (Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies) NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) to the more recent and advanced MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) NDVI data set, and mapped circumpolar trends in a gross productivity metric derived from the former. We then analyzed how temporal changes in productivity differed along an evergreen–deciduous gradient in boreal Alaska, along a shrub cover gradient in Arctic Alaska, and during succession after fire in boreal North America and northern Eurasia. We find that the earlier reported contrast between trends of increasing tundra and decreasing boreal forest productivity has amplified in recent years, particularly in North America. Decreases in boreal forest productivity are most prominent in areas of denser tree cover and, particularly in Alaska, evergreen forest stands. On the North Slope of Alaska, however, increases in tundra productivity do not appear restricted to areas of higher shrub cover, which suggests enhanced productivity across functional vegetation types. Differences in the recovery of post-disturbance vegetation productivity between North America and Eurasia are described using burn chronosequences, and the potential factors driving regional differences are discussed.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74fc22b90a3898a1e89400e2378b4e5cb127d4cd

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Citations in the corpus

• Record-low primary productivity and high plant damage in the Nordic Arctic Region in 2012 caused by multiple weather events and pest outbreaks (2014, background): “…in on-going Arctic monitoring programmes in order to better understand how factors other than average summer temperature, drought and wildfires (Angert et al 2005, Goetz et al 2007, Groisman et al 2007, Zhao and Running 2010, Beck and Goetz 2011, Berner et al 2012) affect primary productivity.”
• Trend Change Detection in NDVI Time Series: Effects of Inter-Annual Variability and Methodology (2013, neutral): “Alaska is of special interest for the analysis of trend change detection methods because previous studies reported greening NDVI trends in tundra ecosystems of the Alaska North Slope as well as browning trends in the Alaska boreal forests [13,17,31,53].”
• Quantifying Boreal Forest Structure and Composition Using UAV Structure from Motion (2018, background): “Climate warming may also alter site productivity and species composition, given the potential for northward migration of forest and woody shrub species [4] and disturbance-driven biome boundary shifts with increasing frequency and severity of stand-replacing wildfires [1,5,6].”
• Spatial and Temporal Variation of NDVI in Response to Climate Change and the Implication for Carbon Dynamics in Nepal (2018, methodology): “For our purpose, we used the most popular NDVI data [55] due to their long and continuous record [56].”
• Changes in growing season duration and productivity of northern vegetation inferred from long-term remote sensing data (2016, background): “This reflects the higher sensitivity of tundra vegetation productivity as compared to boreal forests (Verbyla 2008, Beck and Goetz 2011).”