Abstract
Vegetation greenness (normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI) showed significant temporal and spatial correlations with precipitation and topography-derived features within the context of slope aspect (South- (SFS) and North-facing slopes (NFS) and an intermountain valley (IMV)) in a semi-arid Mediterranean-climate watershed in northwestern Baja California, México. Rank correlation with annual precipitation (1986–2016) showed a strong positive relationship with wet season NDVI at SFS (Rs = 0.82), IMV (Rs = 0.79), and NFS (Rs = 0.65) but moderate relation and only on hillslopes in the dry season (SFS, Rs = 0.47; NFS, Rs = 0.39). Thus, the vegetation on the more xeric SFS sites was more responsive to intra-annual and inter-annual precipitation than on either IMV or NFS. The correlation of NDVI with six topography-derived environmental attributes (elevation, slope gradient, curvature, drainage density, topographic wetness index, solar radiation) was weak to moderate, varied in degree and significance between years with exceptionally high or low NDVI, and often differed in sign between SFS, NFS, and IMV. Results showed that precipitation controlled vegetation greenness, under the three aspect conditions, more closely than did the other topography-derived features, and the sparse deciduous vegetation of SFS showed stronger associations with precipitation than IMV or NFS. The measurement of these relationships should be continued and complemented by other studies to improve the overall model, because they are important to modeling ecohydrology and productivity, and may be of use for projecting and hindcasting vegetation dynamics.
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Acknowledgements
The authors express their gratitude to the Fondo Institucional de Fomento Regional para el Desarrollo Científico, Tecnológico y de Innovación (FORDECYT) project number 146606 for partially financing this research. F. Del Toro thanks to the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) for a graduate scholarship, to the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) for the education received, to the Comisión Nacional del Agua (CONAGUA) for providing climatologic data, and to C. Villarraga-Morales for ongoing support. We also thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped to improve the manuscript substantially.
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Data sharing is not suitable for this paper because no datasets were generated during the current study. Also, datasets that derived from public resources are available with the paper.
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Del-Toro-Guerrero, F.J., Kretzschmar, T. & Bullock, S.H. Precipitation and topography modulate vegetation greenness in the mountains of Baja California, México. Int J Biometeorol 63, 1425–1435 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01763-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01763-5