Impacts of climate change and LUCC on eco-hydrological processes in semi-arid and semi-humid regions of China

The semi-arid and semi-humid region of China occupies an area of more than 200 million km2. Since years of ecological restoration implementation, land use cover changes (LUCC) significantly with the vegetation continually recovered in the recent decades. During this period, climate change is significant in the region with air warming and precipitation extremes intensification. How climate change and LUCC play different roles in the land surface – atmosphere exchanges and catchment hydrological processes is still not clear.  Based on VIP (Vegetation Interface Processes) distributed eco-hydrological model, the eco-hydrological changes are predicted integrated with remotely sensed vegetation information. Fourteen catchments in the study region are selected to explore the diversified responses and feedbacks of the vegetation recovery to climate change. It is found that evapotranspiration (ET) and vegetation gross primary productivities (GPP) are increasing steadily in the study period from 2000 to 2020, in which ET and GPP from the forest and cropland are more distinguished with each other. However, terrestrial water storage is decreasing in the southern catchment, especially those over the Loess Plateau. Although the water consumption from vegetation is increased, water availability  is still increasing in most of the study area due to enhanced precipitation, which implicated the intensification of the hydrological cycle with climate change and global greening. The complex interactions and feedback between re-vegetation and climate change in the water limited region posed challenges to the water resources management and ecosystem stability, in need of paying much more special attention.