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Bidirectional coupling between land‐use change and desertification in arid areas: A study contrasting intracoupling and telecoupling

In arid areas, land‐use change interacts with desertification through water resources. Since water is flowing, the interaction between land‐use change and desertification is not only local, but also regional. Previous studies have focused on the unidirectional influence of land‐use change on desertification, but little research has quantitatively examined the bidirectional coupling, especially contrasting the difference between intracoupling (interactions within a sub‐catchment) and telecoupling (interactions across different sub‐catchments) within a hydraulically linked watershed. To solve this issue, we introduced a vector autoregressive model and designed a strategy from intracoupling to telecoupling to examine the interactions between them in the Tarim River. In intracoupling, a negative relationship was found in most areas. The increase of the land‐use degree inhibits the desertification expansion, and this inhibition degree in the short term increases with the desertification degree. Conversely, the effect of desertification on land use is relatively smaller, and the feedback direction is related to land‐use degree. The region with a relatively low farmland exploitation intensity shows negative feedback and vice versa. In telecoupling, a positive relationship was found: Increasing land‐use degree in upstream sub‐catchment aggravates the desertification expansion in midstream and downstream sub‐catchments. Regarding the opposing unidirectional effect, after desertification expansion in midstream and downstream sub‐catchments, humans will slow down land exploitation in the upstream sub‐catchment, but this behaviour has a certain time lag. This study demonstrates that the special relationship found in telecoupling should be considered in the model development of desertification and land‐use simulation.