Vegetation deficiency in a typical region of the Loess Plateau in China

Located in the central Chinese Loess Plateau, the Jinghe River is one of the major tributaries of the Yellow River, and the river basin it inhabits is characterized by a continental climate. Considering that land degradation has been the main ecological problem in the Jinghe River Basin, there is an urgent need to scientifically explore the land degradation mechanism in order to restore natural ecological environments, prevent further irreversible degradation, and retain value of these productive lands. To that end, a potential vegetation prediction and current vegetation degradation evaluation of the study area are the first and foremost jobs worth doing. In this paper, the Holdrige method is used to calculate the annual Aridity Index (AI), and a climate-vegetation based AI-NDVI model was proposed to predict the potential vegetation index, on which basis the potential vegetation index and potential vegetation distribution were both obtained. With the potential vegetation index and current vegetation index, the gap between the current and the potential vegetation was easy to calculate. This gap exhibits vegetation degradation objectively in the Jinghe River Basin. The AINDVI approach is expected to prove effective for ecological planning and management on a landscape and regional scale and to fuel integration between hydrology and ecology during ecological restoration research.