feng (2025) Underrated yet vital: Vegetation restoration-driven non-growing season land surface roughness in the Eastern Hobq Desert, Northern China

Identification

• Journal: Mendeley Data
• Year: 2025
• Date: 2025-12-04
• Authors: feng, ji
• DOI: 10.17632/6mmz7wd6vk

Research Groups

Ji Feng and collaborators (affiliation not explicitly stated in the provided text).

Short Summary

This paper presents a comprehensive dataset of land surface roughness and near-surface characteristics from 11 sites in the Eastern Hobq Desert, Northern China, emphasizing the critical, often underestimated, role of vegetation restoration in influencing non-growing season land surface roughness.

Objective

• To provide a detailed, measured dataset for studying the impact of vegetation restoration on non-growing season land surface roughness and associated biophysical and soil characteristics in the Eastern Hobq Desert.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: 11 distinct sites within the Eastern Hobq Desert, Northern China, encompassing various vegetation restoration types and ages, as well as sandy land.
• Temporal Scale: The dataset includes restoration ages (in years) for different vegetation types, implying a chronosequence approach to capture temporal changes due to restoration. The data itself represents measurements taken at specific points in time.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: No models were used; all data are direct field measurements.
• Data sources: Direct field measurements collected from 11 sites in the Hobq Desert.
  • Measured parameters include:
    • Land surface roughness (LSR).
    • Near-surface characteristics: stem diameter (SD), litter density (LD), litter thickness (LT), litter coverage (LC), biological crust thickness (BCT), biological crust coverage (BCC), bulk density (BD), soil organic matter content (SOC), sand content, silt content, clay content, and soil water content (SWC).
  • Vegetation types studied: Salix psammophila (SP), Caragana korshinskii (CK), Artemisia ordosica (AO), Populus simonii (PS), and sandy land (SL).

Main Results

• The primary result is the creation and public availability of a unique dataset comprising land surface roughness and 12 near-surface characteristic parameters from 11 sites in the Eastern Hobq Desert.
• This dataset quantifies the physical and biological attributes of restored and natural sandy lands, providing crucial information for understanding the effects of vegetation restoration on land surface properties, particularly during the non-growing season.
• The data implicitly supports the assertion that vegetation restoration significantly influences land surface roughness, a factor deemed "underrated yet vital."

Contributions

• This article's original value lies in providing a novel, directly measured dataset focused on non-growing season land surface roughness and associated biophysical and soil properties in a critical desertification region.
• The dataset serves as a valuable resource for researchers investigating the long-term ecological impacts of vegetation restoration, land-atmosphere interactions, and desertification control strategies in arid and semi-arid environments.

Funding

Not explicitly mentioned in the provided text.

Citation

@article{feng2025Underrated,
  author = {feng, ji},
  title = {Underrated yet vital: Vegetation restoration-driven non-growing season land surface roughness in the Eastern Hobq Desert, Northern China},
  journal = {Mendeley Data},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.17632/6mmz7wd6vk},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17632/6mmz7wd6vk}
}