China’s deserts greening and response to climate variability and human activities

14. Martiny N, Camberlin P, Richard Y, Philippon N. Compared regimes of NDVI and rainfall in semi-arid regions of Africa. International Journal of Remote Sensing. 2006; 27(23):5201–23. 15. Olusegun CF, Adeyewa ZD. Spatial and temporal variation of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and rainfall in the north east arid zone of Nigeria. Atmospheric and Climate Sciences. 2013; 2013. 16. Weiss JL, Gutzler DS, Coonrod JEA, Dahm CN. Long-term vegetation monitoring with NDVI in a diverse semi-arid setting, central New Mexico, USA. Journal of Arid Environments. 2004; 58(2):249–72. 17. Li Y, Liu Y, Zhang P, YIN Y-h. Research on the spatio-temporal change of NDVI in the Gurbantunggut Desert. Arid Zone Research. 2009; 26(5):686–93. 18. Propastin P, Kappas M, Muratova N. Inter-Annual Changes in Vegetation Activities and Their Relation- ship to Temperature and Precipitation in Central Asia from 1982 to 2003. Journal of Environmental Informatics. 2008; 12(2). 19. Fensholt R, Langanke T, Rasmussen K, Reenberg A, Prince SD, Tucker C, et al. Greenness in semi- arid areas across the globe 1981–2007—an Earth Observing Satellite based analysis of trends and driv- ers. Remote sensing of environment. 2012; 121:144–58. 20. Kawabata A, Ichii K, Yamaguchi Y. Global monitoring of interannual changes in vegetation activities using NDVI and its relationships to temperature and precipitation. International journal of remote sens- ing. 2001; 22(7):1377–82. 21. Formica AF, Burnside RJ, Dolman PM. Rainfall validates MODIS-derived NDVI as an index of spatio-

temporal variation in green biomass across non-montane semi-arid and arid Central Asia. Journal of Arid Environments. 2017; 142:11–21. 22. Chen C, Park T, Wang X, Piao S, Xu B, Chaturvedi RK, et al. China and India lead in greening of the world through land-use management. Nature sustainability. 2019; 2(2):122–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41893-019-0220-7 PMID: 30778399 23. Evans J, Geerken R. Discrimination between climate and human-induced dryland degradation. Journal of arid environments. 2004; 57(4):535–54. 24. Wessels KJ, Prince S, Malherbe J, Small J, Frost P, VanZyl D. Can human-induced land degradation be distinguished from the effects of rainfall variability? A case study in South Africa. Journal of arid envi- ronments. 2007; 68(2):271–97. 25. He B, Chen A, Wang H, Wang Q. Dynamic response of satellite-derived vegetation growth to climate change in the Three North Shelter Forest Region in China. Remote Sensing. 2015; 7(8):9998–10016. 26. Ichii K, Kawabata A, Yamaguchi Y. Global correlation analysis for NDVI and climatic variables and NDVI trends: 1982–1990. International journal of remote sensing. 2002; 23(18):3873–8. 27. Zhou L, Tucker CJ, Kaufmann RK, Slayback D, Shabanov NV, Myneni RB. Variations in northern vege- tation activity inferred from satellite data of vegetation index during 1981 to 1999. Journal of Geophys- ical Research: Atmospheres. 2001; 106(D17):20069–83. 28. Karnieli A, Agam N, Pinker RT, Anderson M, Imhoff ML, Gutman GG, et al. Use of NDVI and land sur-

face temperature for drought assessment: Merits and limitations. Journal of climate. 2010; 23(3):618– 33. 29. Wang J, Rich PM, Price KP. Temporal responses of NDVI to precipitation and temperature in the central Great Plains, USA. International journal of remote sensing. 2003; 24(11):2345–64. 30. Liu Y, Li Y, Li S, Motesharrei S. Spatial and temporal patterns of global NDVI trends: correlations with climate and human factors. Remote Sensing. 2015; 7(10):13233–50. 31. Miao L, Jiang C, Xue B, Liu Q, He B, Nath R, et al. Vegetation dynamics and factor analysis in arid and semi-arid Inner Mongolia. Environmental Earth Sciences. 2015; 73(5):2343–52. 32. Noy-Meir I. Desert ecosystems: environment and producers. Annual review of ecology and systematics. 1973; 4(1):25–51. 33. Mohammat A, Wang X, Xu X, Peng L, Yang Y, Zhang X, et al. Drought and spring cooling induced recent decrease in vegetation growth in Inner Asia. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. 2013; 178:21– 30. 34. Ren J, Liu H, Yin Y, He S. Drivers of greening trend across vertically distributed biomes in temperate arid Asia. Geophysical research letters. 2007; 34(7). 35. Mao D, Wang Z, Luo L, Ren C. Integrating AVHRR and MODIS data to monitor NDVI changes and their relationships with climatic parameters in Northeast China. International Journal of Applied Earth Obser- vation and Geoinformation. 2012; 18:528–36. 36. Piao S, Fang J, Zhou L, Guo Q, Henderson M, Ji W, et al. Interannual variations of monthly and sea-

sonal normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in China from 1982 to 1999. Journal of Geophys- ical Research: Atmospheres. 2003; 108(D14). PLOS ONE China’s deserts greening and response to climate variability and human activities PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256462 August 30, 2021 17 / 20