Characterizing Drought Effects on Vegetation Productivity in the Four Corners Region of the US Southwest

Mohamed Abd Salam EL-Vilaly, Kamel Didan, Stuart E. Marsh, Michael A. Crimmins and Armando Barreto Munoz
Additional contact information
Mohamed Abd Salam EL-Vilaly: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K St, NW, Washington, DC 20006-1002, USA
Kamel Didan: Department of Biosystems Engineering, The University of Arizona, 1177 E. 4th Street, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Stuart E. Marsh: Arizona Remote Sensing Center, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, The University of Arizona, 1311 E. 4th Street, BioSciences East 325, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Michael A. Crimmins: Department of Soils, Water and Environmental Science, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Armando Barreto Munoz: Department of Biosystems Engineering, The University of Arizona, 1177 E. 4th Street, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-16

Abstract: The droughts striking the Colorado Plateau, where the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation Native American reservation lands are located, and their impacts have appeared slowly and relatively unnoticed in conventional national drought monitoring efforts like the National Drought Monitor. To understand the effect of drought-based drivers on vegetation productivity in the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation reservation lands, an assessment approach was developed integrating climate, land cover types, and topographical data with annual geospatially explicit normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-related productivity from 1989 to 2014 derived from 15-day composite multi-sensor NDVI time series data. We studied vegetation–environment relationships by conducting multiple linear regression analysis to explain the driver of vegetation productivity changes. Our results suggest that the interannual change of vegetation productivity showed high variability in middle elevations where needleleaf forest is the dominant vegetation cover type. Our analysis also shows that the spatial variation in interannual variability of vegetation productivity was more driven by climate drivers than by topography ones. Specifically, the interannual variability in spring precipitation and fall temperature seems to be the most significant factor that correlated with the interannual variability in vegetation productivity during the last two and a half decades.

Keywords: drought; NDVI time series; vegetation productivity; Hopi and Navajo Nation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/5/1643/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/5/1643/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:5:p:1643-:d:147941

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().