Responses of Spatiotemporal Vegetative Land Cover To Meteorological Changes in Bangladesh

Abstract Quantifying the response of vegetation cover change (VCC) to climatic variables is a gap that is mandatory for the conservation and rehabilitation of natural landscape to ensure sustainability. This study aims to assess the response of VCC to temperature and rainfall change in Bangladesh. We used (i) Landsat images to analyze VCC using image classification method, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) (ii) temperature and rainfall statistics to investigate the spatiotemporal variations (SV) of meteorological factors, urban lands, VCC in all the 64 districts of Bangladesh during 1990-2018 and examined their correlation. To quantify the impact of urbanization on VCC, two regression models were built between growing-season NDVI (GNDVI) and urban land proportion (PLU). Results show that the SV of precipitation, temperature, GNDVI, and PUL varied greatly among the districts. GNDVI was found closely related to climatic variables and less sensitive to climatic factor changes. There has been found a significant correlation between the trend of GNDVI and GP while the negative correlation between GNDVI trend and GT, ΔPUL. Strong sensitivity of GNDVI change to GP was calculated in the range of precipitation 2200-3000mm and GNDVI to GT change in the range of temperature 300C-310C. Besides, urban expansion was found mostly responsible for VCC in the study area.