The accurate estimation of gross primary production (GPP) is crucial to understanding plant carbon sequestration and grasping the quality of the ecological environment. Nevertheless, due to the inconsistencies of current GPP products, the variations, trends and short-term predictions of GPP have not been sufficiently well studied. In this study, we explore the spatiotemporal variability and trends of GPP and its associated climatic and anthropogenic factors in China from 1982 to 2015, mainly based on the optimum light use efficiency (LUEopt) product. We also employ an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to forecast the monthly GPP for a one-year lead time. The results show that GPP experienced an upward trend of 2.268 g C/m² per year during the studied period, that is, an increasing rate of 3.9% per decade since 1982. However, these trend changes revealed distinct heterogeneity across space and time. The positive trends were mainly distributed in the Yellow River and Huaihe River out of the nine major river basins in China. We found that the dynamics of GPP were concurrently affected by climate factors and human activities. While air temperature and leaf area index (LAI) played dominant roles at a national level, the effects of precipitation, downward shortwave radiation (SRAD), carbon dioxide (CO₂) and aerosol optical depth (AOD) exhibited discrepancies in terms of degree and scope. The ARIMA model achieved satisfactory prediction performance in most areas, though the accuracy was influenced by both data values and data quality. The model can potentially be generalized for other biophysical parameters with distinct seasonality. Our findings are further verified and corroborated by four widely used GPP products, demonstrating a good consistency of GPP trends and prediction. Our analysis provides a robust framework for characterizing long-term GPP dynamics that shed light on the improved assessment of the environmental quality of terrestrial ecosystems.

Satellite retrieval can offer global soil moisture information, such as Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) data. AMSR-E has been used to provide soil moisture all over the world, with a coarse resolution of 25 km × 25 km. The coarse resolution of the soil moisture dataset often hinders its use in local or regional research. This work proposes a new framework based on the random forest (RF) model while using five auxiliary data to downscale the AMSR-E soil moisture data over North China. The downscaled results with a 1 km spatial resolution are verified against in situ measurements. Compared with AMSR-E data, the correlation coefficient of the downscaled data is increased by 0.17, and the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and unbiased root mean square error are reduced by 0.02, 0.01, and 0.03 m³/m³, respectively. In addition, the comparison results with Multiple Linear Regression and Support Vector Regression downscaled data show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the other two methods. The feasibility of our model is well supported by the importance analysis and leave-one-out analysis. Our study, which combines RF with spatiotemporal search algorithms and efficient auxiliary data, may provide insights into soil moisture downscaling in large areas with various surface characteristics and climatic conditions.

Rapid and accurate monitoring of spatial distribution patterns of winter wheat over a long period is of great significance for crop yield prediction and farmland water consumption estimation. However, weather conditions and relatively long revisit cycles often result in an insufficient number of continuous medium-high resolution images over large areas for many years. In addition, the cropland pattern changes frequently in the fallow rotation area. A novel rapid mapping model for winter wheat based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time-series coefficient of variation (NDVI_COV_fp) and peak-slope difference index (PSDI) is proposed in this study. NDVI_COV_fp uses the time-series index volatility to distinguish cultivated land from background land-cover types. PSDI combines the key growth stages of winter wheat phenology and special bimodal characteristics, substantially reducing the impact of abandoned land and other crops. Taking the Heilonggang as an example, this study carried out a rapid mapping of winter wheat for four consecutive years (2014–2017), and compared the proposed COV_PSDI with two state-of-the-art methods and traditional methods (the Spectral Angle Mapping (SAM) and the Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analysis Technique Algorithm (ISODATA)). The verification results revealed that the COV_PSDI model improved the overall accuracy (94.10%) by 4% compared with the two state-of-art methods (90.80%, 89.00%) and two traditional methods (90.70%, 87.70%). User accuracy was the highest, which was 93.74%. Compared with the other four methods, the percentage error (PE) of COV_PSDI for four years was the lowest in the same year, with the minimum variation range of PE being 1.6–3.6%. The other methods resulted in serious overestimation. This demonstrated the effectiveness and stability of the method proposed in the rapid and accurate extraction of winter wheat in a large area of fallow crop rotation region. Our study provides insight for remote sensing monitoring of spatiotemporal patterns of winter wheat and evaluation of “fallow rotation” policy implementation.