Assessment of climatic factors effect on vegetation in the Zagross region using satellite images

The aim of this research was to evaluate the effect of climatic factors on vegetation in rangelands of Zagross with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor, and climatic data. The study area was rangelands of Zagross with 51-75, 26-50 and 10-25 density. Satellite images and climatic factors were respectively studied from January to October 2006 and from September 2005 to October 2006. Effects of seven monthly climatic variables (precipitation, temperature and relative humidity (maximum, mean and minimum) were studied on monthly NDVI. Zoning was performed by geostatistical method and Multivariate Ordinary Least Squares regression (MOLS) was applied to study the effect of climatic factors on vegetation changes. According to the Results CO-Kriging was identified as the best method for zoning, and Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) only in mean temperature showed a better distance. Vegetation responses to precipitation of last two months, and temperature and relative humidity of last one month. Results of MOLS showed higher correlation in rangelands with a density of 51-75 %, but generally, correlation was low in rangelands with a density of 10-25 %, that can be due to the low altitude from sea level, effect of soil background and agricultural field margins. Also, low height in rangelands with a density of 10-25 % increased the temperature and transferred the start of leaf greenness to March, while in rangelands with a density of 51-75 % greenness started in May. The highest and lowest R2 values were calculated as 0.6478 for dense rangelands in May and 0.136 for low density rangelands in August.