Assessing Vegetation Dynamics and Landscape Ecological Risk on the Mainstream of Tarim River, China

The Tarim River (TR), the longest inland river at an arid area in China, plays a critical role in the sustainable development of the regional ecological environment. This study presents the spatial-temporal variations in the vegetation coverage at regional and pixel scales and its driving factors on the TR mainstream. The latest dataset of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and a vegetation coverage index (fc) over the period from 2000–2015 were analyzed with the unary linear regression and the partial correlation. On the basis of land use data, we further built the landscape ecological risk index and assessed the ecological risk level of the mainstream. Our results suggest that the vegetation coverage index demonstrated fluctuations but denoted a generally upward trend in the TR mainstream, the vegetation improvement areas are far greater than the degraded areas during the study period. Apparently, the overflow days in the TR mainstream and the cumulative amount of water transport are the two main factors that dominate the vegetation coverage. The ecological risk level varies throughout the TR with a high-to-low spatial distribution from upstream to downstream, and the overall landscape ecological risk of the whole basin exhibits an upward tendency. Above all, our study provides a framework with the remote sensing data to assess vegetation coverage and landscape ecological risk which can help design and implement reliable strategies for the ecological management and vegetation restoration in the Tarim River Basin.