Shifting drivers of greening in Southwest China’s karst landscapes: from agricultural pressure to urbanization pull
摘要
In the past 20 years, the karst peak-cluster depression in Southwest China has shown an obvious tendency of vegetation greening. Changes in the normalized vegetation index (NDVI) reflect the differences in vegetation greenness and productivity, providing key data for understanding the long-term interaction between humans and the environment. This process shows the transformation from ecological degradation to improvement of vegetation conditions and reveals the social-ecological turning point and policy meaning. This study focuses on the peak and depression areas of Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan Provinces and analyzes the impact of human activities on NDVI-based vegetation greening tendency from 2000 to 2020. The study combines GIS spatial attribution, R language geographic detectors, and a cultural factor interference index system to quantify driving factors and their changes in explanatory power over time. The results show the following: (1) agricultural dominance period: from 2000 to 2005, X3-agricultural development (percentage of arable land) was the main driver of NDVI evolution (q = 0.22); (2) urban development dominance period: from 2005 to 2020, X5-degree of urbanization (population density) became the main driving factor, changing from having the lowest explanatory power in 2000 to the highest explanatory power in 2015; (3) different combinations of human factors have a nonlinear interactive enhancement effect on NDVI. Between 2000 and 2020, the combination of X3-agricultural development (percentage of arable land) and X5-degree of urbanization (population density) consistently had the highest explanatory power, followed by the combination of X4-population movement (population migration ratio) and X5-degree of urbanization (population density).