Change in observed long-term greening across Switzerland – evidence from a three decades NDVI time-series and its relationship with climate and land cover factors

Abstract

Environmental changes are significantly modifying terrestrial vegetation dynamics, with serious consequences on Earth system functioning and provision of ecosystem services. Land conditions are an essential element underpinning global sustainability frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), requiring effective solutions to assess the impacts of changing land conditions induced by various driving forces. At the global scale, long-term increase of vegetation greening has been widely reported notably in seasonally snow-covered ecosystems as a response to warming climate. However, greening trends at the national scale have received less attention, although countries like Switzerland are prone to important changing climate conditions. Hereby, we used a 35-year satellite-derived annual and seasonal time-series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to assess vegetation greenness evolution at different spatial and temporal scales across Switzerland and related them to temperature, precipitation, and land cover to investigate possible responses of changing climatic conditions. Results indicate that there is a statistically significant greening trend at the national scale with an NDVI mean increasing slope of 0.6%/year for the 61% significant pixels across Switzerland. In particular, the seasonal mean NDVI shows an important break for winter, autumn and spring seasons starting from 2010, potentially indicating a critical point of changing land conditions. At biogeographical scale, we observed an apparent clustering (Jura-Plateau; Northern-Southern Alps; Eastern-Western Alps) related to landscape characteristics, while forested land cover classes are more responsive to NDVI changes. Finally, the NDVI values are mostly a function of temperature at elevations below the tree line rather than precipitation. The findings suggest that multi-annual and seasonal NDVI can be a valuable indicator to monitor vegetation conditions at different scales and can provide complementary observations for national statistics on the ecological state of vegetation to monitor land affected by changing environmental conditions. This work is aiming at strengthening the insights into the driving factors of vegetation change and supporting monitoring changing land conditions to provide guidance for effective and efficient environmental management and sustainable development policy advice at the national scale.