Climate change and human activities are reshaping the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems, particularly in vulnerable regions such as agro-pastoral ecotones. However, the extent to which climate change impacts vegetation growth in these areas remains poorly understood, largely due to the modifying effects of human-induced land cover changes on vegetation sensitivity to climatic variations. This study utilizes satellite-derived vegetation indices, land cover datasets, and climate data to investigate the influence of both land cover and climate changes on vegetation growth in the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China (APENC) from 2001 to 2022. The results reveal that the sensitivity of vegetation productivity, as indicated by the kernel Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (kNDVI), varies depending on the land cover type to climate change in the APENC. Moreover, ridge regression modeling shows that pre-season climate conditions (i.e., pre-season precipitation and temperature) have a stronger positive impact on growing-season vegetation productivity than growing season precipitation and temperature, while the effect of vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is negative. Notably, the kNDVI exhibits significant positive sensitivity (p < 0.05) to precipitation in 34.12% of the region and significant negative sensitivity (p < 0.05) to VPD in 38.80%. The ridge regression model explained 89.10% of the total variation (R² = 0.891). These findings not only emphasize the critical role of both historical and contemporary climate conditions in shaping vegetation growth but also provide valuable insights into how to adjust agricultural and animal husbandry management strategies to improve regional climate adaptation based on climate information from previous seasons in fragile regions.

Accurate assessment of the cooling effect from urban green space (UGS) is largely hindered by insufficient field samples or consideration of the internal and surrounding three-dimensional (3D) structure. This study developed a transferable modeling-optimization framework that integrated a multi-temporal sampling strategy, multimodal 3D environmental reconstruction, and Bayesian-based optimization. First, the potential influencing factors of the cooling effect were quantified from three aspects of inner 2D/3D structure, surrounding building ventilation, and background meteorology through fusing field measurements, multi-spectral UAV images, and Sentinel-2 images. Then, a generalized additive mixed-effects model was used to explore cooling-related patterns of UGS, and a Bayesian network was further applied to identify potential optimized configurations. The results suggest the following: (1) The adopted multi-temporal sampling strategy enhances the stability of detected cooling signals and minimizes spatial interference among neighboring UGS patches and water bodies. (2) Temporal changes in the cooling effect are mainly driven by average air temperature and maximum wind speed, while the spatial variation by the UGS inner characteristics of area and shape index and surrounding ventilation. (3) The “win–win” situation of cooling intensity and range occurred in UGSs with larger areas, higher shape regularity, and medium ventilation. This approach is useful for model-based planning of climate-responsive green infrastructure and city-scale ventilation systems in heat-vulnerable environments.