{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.016680567139282735, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.666666666666667, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The effect of precipitation and air temperature on land‐cover change in the Sahel

Vegetation changes in the Sahel region are strongly affected by variation in rainfall, but air temperature has been considered a relatively minor climatic factor in previous studies. However, soil moisture, the major water source for vegetation in arid and semiarid regions, is generally dependent on temperature‐controlled evaporation. Therefore, we can hypothesize that air temperature modifies the sensitivity of vegetation greenness to rainfall because water loss in soil is critically vulnerable to temperature, although Sahel plants can tolerate high temperatures. In this study, the annual mean of daily maximum air temperature was used as a constraint in analyzing the relationships between annual changes in the cumulative enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and total rainfall. We found that rainfall increase in hotter years could not well induce land greening, and decreased rainfall in cooler years did not necessarily cause vegetation degradation. This presents the importance of temperature as a climatic component in understanding the mechanism of rainfall‐induced land‐cover changes in the Sahel region.