Recent vegetation browning and its drivers on Tianshan Mountain, Central Asia

Abstract The strong signal of vegetation increases since the 1980s is considered as reliable evidence of anthropogenic climate change. However, some studies have alerted us to the recent stalling or even reversal of vegetation greening. To determine whether vegetation browning exists on Tianshan Mountain, we investigated the changes in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) based on long-term satellite-derived NDVI data series from 1982 to 2015. Although the trend of growing season NDVI was statistically significant throughout the study period (0.0006a−1, p