Integrating precipitation, grazing, past effects and interactions in long-term vegetation change

摘要

Determining the causes of vegetation change in arid and semi-arid environments can be difficult and may involve multiple factors, including disturbance, inter-annual climatic variation, soils, effects from years past and interactions between these factors. Theoretical models describing vegetation change in these systems have generally focused on a single aspect as the primary driver. The integration of these factors into a single model may be what is required to fully understand the drivers of vegetation change in desert systems. To test the contributions of these various factors, we analyzed a long-term (1979-2011) vegetation dataset using multiple linear regression.