Assessment of climate impact on vegetation dynamics over East Africa from 1982 to 2015

Abstract Located across the equator, the East Africa region is among regions of Africa which have previously known the severe vegetation degradation. Some known reasons are associated with the climate change events and unprofessional agricultural practices. For this purpose, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) version 3 NDVI (NDVI3g) and Climate Research Unit (CRU) datasets for precipitation and temperature were used to assess the impact of climate factors on vegetation dynamics over East Africa from 1982 to 2015. Pearson correlation of NDVI and climate factors were also explored to investigate the short (October - December) rainy seasons. The phenological metrics of the region was also extracted to understand the seasonal cycle of vegetation. The results show that a positive linear trend of 14.50 × 10 −4 for mean annual NDVI before 1998, where as a negative linear trend of −9.64 × 10 −4 was found after 1998. The Break Point (BP) was obtained in 1998, which suggests to nonlinear responses of NDVI to climate and non-climate drivers. ENSO-vegetation in El-nino years showed a weak teleconnection between ENSO and vegetation growth changes of croplands. Also, the analyzed correlations on NDVI data resulted to the higher correlation between NDVI and precipitation than that with temperature. The Hurst exponent result showed that about, 18.63% pixels exhibited a behavior, typical of random walk (H = 0.5) suggesting that NDVI growth changes may eventually persist, overturn or fluctuate randomly in the future depending on the drivers. Vegetation trends with sustainable (unsustainable) trends were 36.8% (44.6%). Strikingly, about 20% of the total vegetated area showed unsustainable trend from degradation to amelioration. More so, results reveal that the vegetation of the croplands (non-croplands) over East Africa changed insignificantly by 6.9 × 10 −5 /yr (5.16 × 10 −4 /yr), suggesting that non-croplands are fast getting reduced Nonetheless, the NDVI growth responses to monthly and seasonal changes in climate were adjudged to be complex and dynamic. Seasonally, the short rainy season showed the higher variability in NDVI than the long rainy season. Also, the DJF, MAM and SON seasons are strongly driven by precipitation variation effect of ENSO versus NDVI series.