Quantifying the relative impacts of climate and human activities on vegetation change in Hunan Province between 2000 and 2015

¹ Department of landscape architecture, College of Forestry, Xinyang Agriculture and Forestry University, Xinyang 464000, China
² Academic Affairs Office,College of Forestry, Xinyang Agriculture and Forestry University, Xinyang 464000, China

^* Correspondence: 2020290007@xyafu.edu.cn

Abstract

Since1999, Hunan Province has embarked on a series of ecological projects to return farmland to forests across the province to explore the impacts of anthropogenic policies and actions on changes in vegetation cover between 2000 and 2015.It is important to understand the impacts of anthropogenic and climatic changes on regional vegetation cover change is an important guide for formulating reasonable environmental protection and restoration strategies in the region .this paper analysed the influence of climate and anthropogenic activities on the change of vegetation cover of Hunan Province during 2000-2015, which combined with an improved vegetation-climate residual regression model at the meta-scale. During 2000-2015, the contribution of anthropogenic activities to the increase of vegetation cover was 49%, 53%, 62% and 66% for unconverted forest land, grassland, unused land and water area respectively, while the contribution of climatic factors was 51%, 47%, 38% and 44% respectively. At the same time, all the land use types of contributions to vegetation cover change in Hunan Province is positive, and the land type without forest land change has the largest contribution to vegetation cover change in Hunan Province at 66.28%, while the land type where other land is converted to unused land has a lower contribution to vegetation cover change.