Assessing the land degradation and greening response to changes in hydro‐climatic variables using a conceptual framework: A case‐study in central India

Field‐based investigations of land use/cover changes are time‐consuming and challenging for large areas, where short‐ and long‐term changes in climatic and hydrologic variables affect ecosystem services. Thus, there is a substantial demand to boost the new modelling framework and employ remote sensing capabilities to quantify hydro‐climatic impacts on land dynamics. In this study, a conceptual framework has used to assess the climatic land greening, climatic land degradation, nonclimatic (hydrological) land greening, and nonclimatic (anthropogenic) land degradation responses with hydro‐climatic variables under dry and wet spells' effect in the Betwa River basin (BRB) of central India. Remotely sensed moderate‐resolution imaging spectro‐radiometer (MODIS) (normalized difference vegetation index [NDVI] and land cover) time‐series datasets had been used to quantify spatiotemporal changes in major land use/cover classes. The standardized coefficients for rainfall (β = 0.62) and relative humidity (β = 0.32) showed their high relative importance in the relationship analysis performed using multiple linear regression (MLR). The result indicates that dominant agricultural cropland has been significantly impacted by changes in maximum and diurnal temperature, which affirm degradation, and positively responded by changes in rainfall, minimum temperature, and aridity index, which demonstrate greening wet period. Spatial analysis showed that land degradation affecting ecosystem services had been variedly distributed from the upper to lower basin due to more climatic impacts than anthropogenic disturbances. Thus, the developed conceptual framework can be adopted to discover dynamic land consequences and understand their responses for sustaining ecosystem services in the dominant agricultural region.