Find in Library

Explicitly identifying the desertification changes and causes has been a hot issue of eco-environment sustainable development in the China–Mongolia–Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC) area. In this paper, the desertification change patterns between 2000 and 2015 were identified by operating the classification and regression tree (CART) method with multisource remote sensing datasets on Google Earth Engine (GEE), which has the higher overall accuracy (85%) than three other methods, namely support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and Albedo-normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) models. A contribution index of climate change and human activities on desertification was introduced to quantitatively explicate the driving mechanisms of desertification change based on the temporal datasets and net primary productivity (NPP). The results show that the area of slight desertification land had increased from 719,700 km² to 948,000 km² between 2000 and 2015. The area of severe desertification land decreased from 82,400 km² to 71,200 km². The area of desertification increased by 9.68%, in which 69.68% was mainly caused by human activities. Climate change and human activities accounted for 68.8% and 27.36%, respectively, in the area of desertification restoration. In general, the degree of desertification showed a decreasing trend, and climate change was the major driving factor in the CMREC area between 2000 and 2015.