remote sensing Article Impacts of Re-Vegetation on Surface Soil Moisture over the Chinese Loess Plateau Based on Remote Sensing Datasets Qiao Jiao 1,†, Rui Li 1,2,3,*, Fei Wang 1,2,3,*,†, Xingmin Mu 1,2,3, Pengfei Li 2 and Chunchun An 2 1 College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China;
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[email protected] (X.M.) 2 Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, Yangling 712100, China;
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[email protected] (C.A.) 3 Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China * Correspondence:
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[email protected] (F.W.); Tel.: +86-29-8701-9829 (R.L. & F.W.); Fax: +86-29-8701-2210 (R.L. & F.W.) † These authors contributed equally to this work. Academic Editors: Angela Lausch, Marco Heurich, Nicolas Baghdadi and Prasad S. Thenkabail Received: 4 November 2015; Accepted: 15 February 2016; Published: 19 February 2016 Abstract: A large-scale re-vegetation supported by the Grain for Green Project (GGP) has greatly changed local eco-hydrological systems, with an impact on soil moisture conditions for the Chinese Loess Plateau. It is important to know how, exactly, re-vegetation influences soil moisture conditions, which not only crucially constrain growth and distribution of vegetation, and hence, further re-vegetation, but also determine the degree of soil desiccation and, thus, erosion risk in the region. In this study, three eco-environmental factors, which are Soil Water Index (SWI), the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and precipitation, were used to investigate the response of soil moisture in the one-meter layer of top soil to the re-vegetation during the GGP.