Effects of Land Cover and Regional Climate Variations on Long-Term Spatiotemporal Changes in Sagebrush Ecosystems |
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Abstract: | This research investigated the effects of climate and land cover change on variation in sagebrush ecosystems. We combined information of multi-year sagebrush distribution derived from multitemporal remote sensing imagery and climate data to study the variation patterns of sagebrush ecosystems under different potential disturbances. We found that less than 40% of sagebrush ecosystem changes involved abrupt changes directly caused by landscape transformations and over 60% of the variations involved gradual changes directly related to climatic perturbations. The primary increases in bare ground and declines in sagebrush vegetation abundance were significantly correlated with the 1996-2006 decreasing trend in annual precipitation. |
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