Assessment of spatio-temporal variations in vegetation recovery after the Wenchuan earthquake using Landsat data

The 8.0-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 damaged the ecology of northwestern Sichuan, China. This study assessed ecological changes within a few years of the earthquake through satellite observations of vegetation dynamics in the earthquake area. As an ecological indicator, the fractional vegetation cover was extracted using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index based on multi-year Landsat images and was validated using airborne images. We found that the entire mountainous disaster area had recovered by 68.45 % 3 years after the 2008 earthquake. After rapid recovery of vegetation in 2009, the recovery process slowed. The vegetation recovery rate (VRR) in the area heavily damaged by landslides was slightly lower but nearly that of the entire disaster area. In addition, because of differences in the proportions of soil and rock in the damaged areas, recovery of vegetation in the southwest portion of the study area was slower than in the northeast areas. Topographic analysis of vegetation recovery patterns indicated that damage to vegetation was closely related to slope, while recovery of vegetation was more sensitive to elevation. The landscape analysis showed that the recovery rate (65.21 %) of the excellent vegetation cover type was slower than the overall VRR. This study suggests that vegetation recovery is a slow ecological process and that ecological restoration should be implemented in mountainous regions affected by the earthquake.