Changes in Vegetation Growth Dynamics and Relations with Climate in Inner Mongolia under More Strict Multiple Pre-Processing (2000–2018)

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) is related to China’s ecological security and the improvement of ecological environment; thus, the vegetation’s response to climate changes in IMAR has become an important part of current global change research. As existing achievements have certain deficiencies in data preprocessing, technical methods and research scales, we correct the incomplete data pre-processing and low verification accuracy; use grey relational analysis (GRA) to study the response of Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) in the growing season to climate factors on the pixel scale; explore the factors that affect the response speed and response degree from multiple perspectives, including vegetation type, longitude, latitude, elevation and local climate type; and solve the problems of excessive ignorance of details and severe distortion of response results due to using average values of the wide area or statistical data. The results show the following. 1. The vegetation status of IMAR in 2000-2018 was mainly improved. The change rates were 0.23/10° N and 0.25/10° E, respectively. 2. The response speed and response degree of forests to climatic factors are higher than that of grasslands. 3. The lag time of response for vegetation growth to precipitation, air temperature and relative humidity in IMAR is mainly within 2 months. The speed of vegetation‘s response to climate change in IMAR is mainly affected by four major factors: vegetation type, altitude gradient, local climate type and latitude. 4. Vegetation types and altitude gradients are the two most important factors affecting the degree of vegetation’s response to climate factors. It is worth noting that when the altitude rises to 2500 m, the dominant factor for the vegetation growth changes from precipitation to air temperature in terms of hydrothermal combination in the environment. Vegetation growth in areas with relatively high altitudes is more dependent on air temperature.