Title
Mechanisms, monitoring and modeling of shrub encroachment into grassland: a review
Abstract
Shrub encroachment into arid and semi-arid grasslands has elicited extensive research attention worldwide under the background of climate change and increasing anthropogenic activities. Shrub encroachment may considerably impact local ecosystems and economies, including the conversion of the structure and function of ecosystems, the shift in ambient conditions, and the weakness of local stock farming capacity. This article reviews recent research progresses on the shrub encroachment process and mechanism, shrub identification and dynamic monitoring using remote sensing, and modeling and simulation of the shrub encroachment process and dynamics. These studies can help to evaluate the ecological effect of shrub encroachment, and thus, practically manage and recover the ecological environment of degraded areas. However, the lack of effective measures and data for monitoring shrub encroachment at a large spatial scale severely limits research on the mechanism, modeling, and simulation of shrub encroachment, and the shrub encroachment stages can hardly be quantitatively defined, resulting in insufficient analysis and simulation of shrub encroachment for different spatiotemporal scales and stages shift. Improvement in remote sensing-based shrub encroachment dynamic monitoring might be crucial for analyzing and understanding the process and mechanism of shrub encroachment, and multi-disciplinary and multi-partnerships are required in the shrub encroachment studies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1080/17538947.2018.1478004
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH
Keywords
Field
DocType
Shrub encroachment,arid and semi-arid grassland,mechanism,dynamic monitoring,modeling and simulation
Ecological environment,Climate change,Structure and function,Arid,Remote sensing,Shrub,Grassland,Agroforestry,Geography,Spatial ecology,Ecosystem
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12.0
6.0
1753-8947
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
6
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xin Cao1194.62
Yu Liu231.07
Xihong Cui3277.63
Jin Chen425931.87
Xuehong Chen54711.12