Identifying land restoration regions and their driving mechanisms in inner Mongolia, China from 1981 to 2010

Land degradation is a global environmental issue and efforts to achieve land restoration call for urgent action. This study selected Inner Mongolia of China as a research area and assessed the relative contribution of climate variability and human activities affecting land restoration during different time intervals from 1981 to 2010. The results showed that the spatial extent of land restoration in Inner Mongolia has increased significantly from 1981 to 2010, to more than 248,512 km(2), accounting for 2.11% of the total area. Climatic factors showed heterogeneity in different time intervals; temperature and sunshine duration were the main factors induced land restoration from 1981 to 1995, which mainly attributed to its' positive effect on promoting vegetation photosynthetic efficiency; however, the decrease in wind speed played the most important role in land restoration from 1996 to 2010. The land restoration areas have also been closely associated with human activities, particularly from 1996 to 2010, when afforestation was the main factor driving the increase of land restoration areas, showing that the implementation of the ecological restoration policy of China has played a positive role in land conservation. In addition, the mutual impacts of climate variability and human activities on land restoration have been observed at different scales.