Spatiotemporal variations of growing-season NDVI associated with climate change in northeastern China’s permafrost zone

Vegetation is an essential component of terrestrial ecosystems, and it plays an important role in regulating climate change, the carbon cycle, and energy exchange. And permafrost is extremely sensitive to climate change. In particular, aboveground vegetation on permafrost has great sensitivity to that change. The permafrost zone of northeastern China, within middle and high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, is the second-largest region of permafrost in China. It is at the southern edge of the Eurasian cryolithozone. This study analyzes growing-season spatiotemporal variation of the normalization difference vegetation index (NDVI) in this permafrost zone and the correlation between NDVI and climate variables during 1981-2014. Mean growing-season NDVI significantly increased by 0.0028 yr⁻¹ over the entire permafrost zone. The spatial dynamics of vegetation cover in the zone had strong heterogeneity on the pixel scale. Pixels that showed increasing trends accounted for 80% of the permafrost area, and were mostly found in the permafrost zone with the exception of western steppe regions. Pixels that showed decreasing trends (approximately 20% of the permafrost area) were mainly in the cultivated and steppe portions of the study area. Our results indicated that temperature was the dominant influence on vegetation growth during the growing season in most permafrost zones.