摘要:Recently observed Arctic greening trends from normalized difference vegetation index
(NDVI) data suggest that shrub growth is increasing in response to increasing summer
temperature. An increase in shrub cover is expected to decrease summer albedo
and thus positively feed back to climate warming. However, it is unknown how
albedo and NDVI are affected by shrub cover and inter-annual variations in the
summer climate. Here, we examine the relationship between deciduous shrub
fractional cover, NDVI and albedo using field data collected at a tundra site in
NE Siberia. Field data showed that NDVI increased and albedo decreased with
increasing deciduous shrub cover. We then selected four Arctic tundra study areas and
compiled annual growing season maximum NDVI and minimum albedo maps from
MODIS satellite data (2000–10) and related these satellite products to tundra
vegetation types (shrub, graminoid, barren and wetland tundra) and regional
summer temperature. We observed that maximum NDVI was greatest in shrub
tundra and that inter-annual variation was negatively related to summer minimum
albedo but showed no consistent relationship with summer temperature. Shrub
tundra showed higher albedo than wetland and barren tundra in all four study
areas. These results suggest that a northwards shift of shrub tundra might not
lead to a decrease in summer minimum albedo during the snow-free season when
replacing wetland tundra. A fully integrative study is however needed to link results
from satellite data with in situ observations across the Arctic to test the effect of
increasing shrub cover on summer albedo in different tundra vegetation types.