An Analysis of Temporal Evolution of NDVI in Various Vegetation-Climate Regions in Inner Mongolia, China

Inner Mongolia is an important ecological barrier in northern China. The vegetation coverage and changes in the region will directly affect many important economic regions in China. In this paper, based on the long time series NOAA/AVHRR NDVI dataset and vegetation-climate regions map in Inner Mongolia, we utilized the Mann - Kendall non-parametric test to analyze vegetation change treads in different vegetation-climatic regions from 1982 to 2006. The results showed that different vegetation-climate regions had different vegetation change treads. Therein, Central and Western parts of Inner Mongolia had an ascending trend, while, the eastern part had a descending trend. Inner Mongolia span different climatic regions, and plants lived there had various adaptive capacities under different environments. Therefore, its change trends also were quite different. All these illustrate that, under the background of climate change, the sensibility of vegetation are significant different and some plants in different regions have showed their adaptive capacities. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B. V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of School of Environment, Beijing Normal University.