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- Title
Spatial Aggregation of Global Dry and Wet Patterns Based on the Standard Precipitation Index.
- Authors
Guan, Yanlong; Liu, Junguo; Chen, Aifang; Li, Delong; Jiang, Yelin; Cui, Wenhui; Lu, Hongwei; Pellikka, Petri; Heiskanen, Janne; Maeda, Eduardo
- Abstract
Quantifying the spatial integrity and patterns of dry/wet events over land is essential to understand how the local hydrological regime responds to environmental changes. Spatial aggregation changes in dry and wet areas over land have not been studied extensively. Based on a patch‐mosaic landscape model, we analyzed spatial aggregation changes at two levels corresponding to landscape design during 1949 and 2018. At the landscape level, the global aggregation degree increased initially and then weakened around 2006. However, the spatial aggregation process between dry and wet patterns was inconsistent. For the dry pattern, spatial aggregation was mainly caused by area decline induced decreases in the patch number. For the wet pattern, spatial aggregation was caused by area enlargement induced decreases in the patch number. At the class level, with increases in the dry/wet magnitude, the correlation between the affected area and aggregation strengthened. Our results provide new insights to understand the spatial processes and future trends of dry/wet patterns over land. We argue that future vulnerability of agriculture and ecosystems to drought is likely to be further mediated by the changes in drought patterns' spatial structure. Plain Language Summary: Quantifying the spatial variation characteristics of heterogeneous dry/wet patches worldwide can provide an in‐depth understanding of regional hydrological regimes. Previous studies have mainly focused on area‐based statistics to quantify the changes in the dry/wet patterns, and neglected comprehensive information of the process. Further, whether a long‐term spatial aggregation or fragmentation trend exists is also unknown. The patch‐mosaic model of landscape ecology provides a new tool to explore this hypothesis at the landscape and class levels. Our results showed that at the landscape level, the global spatial aggregation degree increased initially and then weakened around 2006, including the dry landscape (all dry classes considered together), wet landscape (all wet classes considered together), and total landscape (all classes considered together). At the class level, greater the degree of dryness/wetness, stronger was the correlation between the affected area and aggregation. Our findings provide new insights into identifying the increasing exposure of climate change, which can be used to assess the potential impacts of spatial aggregation or disaggregation of droughts on agriculture and ecosystems, and to predict future changes in the spatial structure of drought patterns. Key Points: A simplified patch‐mosaic landscape framework was designed to characterize the spatial aggregation information of global drought patternsAt the landscape level, the global aggregation degree increased since the 1980sAt the class level, the correlation between total area and aggregation degree increased with an increase in dry/wet levels
- Subjects
DROUGHTS; LANDSCAPE design; LANDSCAPE ecology; SPATIAL variation; CLIMATE change
- Publication
Earth's Future, 2022, Vol 10, Issue 5, p1
- ISSN
2328-4277
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1029/2022EF002720