Central Asia comprises a large fraction of the world’s drylands, known to be vulnerable to climate change. We analyzed the inter-annual trends and the impact of climate variability in the vegetation greenness for Central Asia from 1982 to 2011 using GIMMS3g normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data. In our study, most areas showed an increasing trend during 1982–1991, but experienced a significantly decreasing trend for 1992–2011. Vegetation changes were closely coupled to climate variables (precipitation and temperature) during 1982–1991 and 1992–2011, but the response trajectories differed between these two periods. The warming trend in Central Asia initially enhanced the vegetation greenness before 1991, but the continued warming trend subsequently became a suppressant of further gains in greenness afterwards. Precipitation expanded its influence on larger vegetated areas in 1992–2011 when compared to 1982–1991. Moreover, the time-lag response of plants to rainfall tended to increase after 1992 compared to the pre-1992 period, indicating that plants might have experienced functional transformations to adapt the climate change during the study period. The impact of climate on vegetation was significantly different for the different sub-regions before and after 1992, coinciding with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It was suggested that these spatio-temporal patterns in greenness change and their relationship with climate change for some regions could be explained by the changes in the socio-economic structure resulted from the USSR collapse in late 1991. Our results clearly illustrate the combined influence of climatic/anthropogenic contributions on vegetation growth in Central Asian drylands. Due to the USSR collapse, this region represents a unique case study of the vegetation response to climate changes under different climatic and socio-economic conditions.

The article presents the evaluation of spatial-temporal characteristics of Kazakhstan arid and semi-arid areas' vegetation on the basis of time series of differential and integral vegetation indices. It is observed the negative trend of integral indices for the period of 2000-2015. This fact characterizes the increase of stress influence of weather conditions on vegetation in Kazakhstan territory during last decade. Simultaneously there is a positive trend of areas of zones with low values of IVCI index. Zoning of the territory of Kazakhstan was carried out according to the long-term values of the normalized integral vegetation index, which is characteristic of the accumulated amount of green season biomass. Negative trend is marked for areas of high productivity zones, long-term changes in the areas of low productivity zones have tend to increase. However long-term values of the area of the middle zone are insignificantly changed. Location boundaries of this zone in the latitudinal direction connects with a weather conditions of the year: all wet years, the average area is located between 46°- 49°N, and the all dry years - between 47°30'- 54°N. The map of frequency of droughts was formed by low values of the integral vegetation condition index which calculated from satellite data.