A Practical Satellite-Derived Vegetation Drought Index for Arid and Semi-Arid Grassland Drought Monitoring

In semi-arid pasture areas, drought may directly influence livestock production, cause economic losses, and accelerate the processes of desertification along with destructive human activities (i.e., overgrazing). The aim of this article is to analyze the disadvantages of several drought indices derived from remote sensing data and develop a new vegetation drought index (VDI) for monitoring of grassland drought with high temporal frequency (dekad) and fine spatial resolution (1 km). The site-based soil moisture data from the field campaign in 2014 and the fenced biomass values at nine sites from 2000 to 2015 were adopted for validation. The results indicate that the proposed VDI would better reflect the extent, severity, and changes of drought compared with single drought indices or the vegetation health index (VHI); specifically, the VDI is more closely related to site-based soil moisture, with R human increasing to approximately 0.07 compared with the VHI; and with normalized fenced biomass (NFB) values, with average R human increasing to approximately 0.11 compared with the VHI. However, the correlations between VHI and VDI with NFB values are relatively lower in desert steppe regions. Furthermore, regional drought-affected data (RDA) are used to ensure spatial consistency of the evaluation; the VDI map is in good agreement with the RDA map based on field measurements. The presented VDI shows reliable and stable drought monitoring ability, which will play an important role in the future drought monitoring of inland grassland.

Automated summary

This article focuses on drought issues in semi-arid pasture areas and proposes a new vegetation drought index (VDI) for monitoring grassland drought. The VDI is shown to better reflect the extent, severity, and changes of drought, and is more closely related to soil moisture and biomass compared to other drought indices.