Regional differences in the factors that affect vegetation cover in China
Zihao Ma, Jiahong Guo, Weiming Li, Zhaoyang Cai, Shixiong Cao
Abstract
Abstract Decreasing vegetation cover leads to serious environmental problems, with negative impacts on human health and socioeconomic development. In recent years, these problems have seriously threatened human societies around the world. Although there have been many studies of urbanization's impacts on natural land cover, ecosystem health, and biodiversity, the effects of spatial variation of human factors and their interaction with climate factors are less well known, particularly in rapidly developing countries such as China. This makes it difficult to design effective ecological restoration policies because the lack of such research creates a high risk of misunderstanding the current situation and wasting a lot of money and labour. To provide some of the missing information, we used municipal‐ and county‐level data from China in 2017 to calculate the contributions of 14 factors that affect vegetation cover, which combine urbanization, socioeconomic development, and natural influences. We found significant regional differences in the impacts of the urbanization and socioeconomic development factors, suggesting that their impact differed among northeastern, southern, and western China, sometimes with opposite effects. This was especially true in western China, where most human factors had negative impacts on vegetation cover. Our research has implications for environmental protection planning in regions affected by environmental degradation in China.