An Integrated Framework for NDVI and LAI Forecasting with Climate Factors: A Case Study in Oujiang River Basin, Southeast China

In the context of increasingly severe climate change, studying the relationship between climate factors and vegetation dynamics is crucial for ecological conservation and sustainable development. This study focuses on the Oujiang River Basin from 1981 to 2022, aiming to quantitatively model the interactions among temperature, precipitation, the NDVI, and the LAI. Addressing the lack of approaches for forecasting high-resolution LAI data and existing LAI data that are usually interpreted from NDVI data, we proposed a two-step inversion framework: first, modeling the response of the NDVI to climate variables; second, predicting the LAI using the NDVI as a mediating variable. By integrating long-term remote sensing datasets (GIMMS and MODIS NDVI) with meteorological data and applying trend analysis, spatial correlation analysis, and clustering techniques (K-Means and Possibilistic C-Means), we identified spatial heterogeneity in vegetation response patterns. The study results showed that (1) climate factors have a distinctly spatially heterogeneous impact on the NDVI and LAI; (2) temperature is identified as the dominant factor in most regions; and (3) the LAI prediction model based on the climate factors NDVI and NDVI–LAI relationships shows good accuracy in the medium-to-high range of the LAI, with an R² value ranging from 0.516 to 0.824. This study provides a scalable approach to improve LAI estimation and monitor vegetation dynamics in complex terrain under changing climate conditions.