Dominant role of grazing and snow cover variability on vegetation shifts in the drylands of Kazakhstan

Kolluru V. John R. Chen J. Konkathi P. Kolluru S. Saraf S. Henebry G.M. Xiao J. Jain K. Kussainova M.
December 2024 Nature Publishing Group

Communications Earth and Environment
2024 #5 Issue 1

Decomposing the responses of ecosystem structure and function in drylands to changes in human-environmental forcing is a pressing challenge. Though trend detection studies are extensive, these studies often fail to attribute them to potential spatiotemporal drivers. Most attribution studies use a single empirical model or a causal graph that cannot be generalized or extrapolated to larger scales or account for spatial changes and multiple independent processes. Here, we proposed and tested a multi-stage, multi-model framework that detects vegetation trends and attributes them to ten independent social-environmental system (SES) drivers in Kazakhstan (KZ). The time series segmented residual trend analysis showed that 45.71% of KZ experienced vegetation degradation, with land use change as the predominant contributor (22.54%; 0.54 million km²), followed by climate change and climate variability. Pixel-wise fitted Granger Causality and random forest models revealed that sheep & goat density and snow cover had dominant negative and positive impacts on vegetation in degraded areas, respectively. Overall, we attribute vegetation changes to SES driver impacts for 19.81% of KZ (out of 2.39 million km²). The identified vegetation degradation hotspots from this study will help identify locations where restoration projects could have a greater impact and achieve land degradation neutrality in KZ.

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Department of Sustainability and Environment, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, 57069, SD, United States
Department of Biology, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, 57069, SD, United States
Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 48823, MI, United States
Center for Global Change and Earth Observations, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 48823, MI, United States
Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Maharashtra, Bombay, 400076, India
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, University of Georgia, 10 Ocean Science Cir, Savannah, 31411, GA, United States
Earth Systems Research Center, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, University of New Hampshire, Durham, 03824, NH, United States
Kazakh National Agrarian Research University, AgriTech Hub KazNARU, 8 Abay Avenue, Almaty, 050010, Kazakhstan
Kazakh-German University (DKU), Nazarbaev avenue, 173, Almaty, 050010, Kazakhstan

Department of Sustainability and Environment
Department of Biology
Department of Geography
Center for Global Change and Earth Observations
Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography
Earth Systems Research Center
Kazakh National Agrarian Research University
Kazakh-German University (DKU)

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