A Regionalized Study on the Spatial-Temporal Changes of Grassland Cover in the Three-River Headwaters Region from 2000 to 2016

The Three-River Headwaters Region (TRHR) is located in the interior of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, which is a typical research area in East Asia and is of fragile environment. This paper studied the characteristics of grassland cover changes in the TRHR between 2000 and 2016 using methods of area division (AD) based on natural conditions and tabulate area (TA) dependent on Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 44B product. Further investigations were conducted on some of the typical areas to determine the characteristics of the changes and discuss the driving factors behind these changes. Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Random Forest (RF), Bayesian (BAYE), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) Machine Learning (ML) methods were employed to evaluate the correlation between grassland cover changes and corresponding variables. The overall trend for grassland cover in the TRHR towards recovery that rose 0.91% during the 17-year study period. The results showed that: (1) The change in grassland cover was more divisive in similar elevation and temperature conditions when the precipitation was stronger. The higher the temperature was, the more significant the rise of grassland cover was in comparable elevation and precipitation conditions. (2) There was a distinct decline and high change standard deviation of grassland cover in some divided areas, and strong correlations were found between grassland cover change and aspect, slope, or elevation in these areas. (3) The study methods of AD and TA achieved enhancing performance in interpretation of grassland cover changes in the broad and high elevation variation areas. (4) RF and CART methods showed higher stability and accuracy in application of grassland cover change study in TRHR among the four ML methods utilized in this study.