# Quantifying Climate Change and Ecological Responses within the Yangtze River Basin, China
## 5 Conclusions  
We have systematically analyzed the spatiotemporal trends of observed and modeled climatic parameters and ecological indicators in the YRB, with the following major conclusions:  
Both the observed data and the model results reveal an increasing trend of air temperature in the YRB during 1961-2013; there was a significant increase in temperature across 99.94% of the region during 1961-2013. However, there is no significant linear trend for annual mean precipitation. To explore temporal trends in ecological indicators, we analyzed variations in annual NDVI and EVI, LAI, annual total GPP and NPP, which exhibited respective rates of increase of 0.002 yr\({}^{-1}\), 0.001 yr\({}^{-1}\), 0.007 m\({}^{2}\)m\({}^{-2}\)decade\({}^{-1}\), 9 TgCyr\({}^{-1}\)yr\({}^{-1}\), and 6 TgCyr\({}^{-1}\)yr\({}^{-1}\). Our results indicated that ecological factors were more strongly correlated with temperature. Specifically, annual mean NDVI and annual mean air temperature showed a significant positive correlation, while the mean growing season air temperature was a moderate positive correlation with mean growing season EVI. In addition, the annual mean air temperature had significant positive correlations with annual LAI and annual GPP; while annual mean air temperature was a moderate positive correlation with annual NPP. So temperature may be the main climatic factor influencing the ecosystem performance over the YRB in the past decades. Finally, possible deficiencies in our methodology should be considered: because of inherent limitations the meteorological data was selected based on the site data, and the spatial interpolation required may have introduced unavoidable errors. In addition, the differences in ecological response to climate change at the global and regional scales need to be considered. Therefore, in future research, climate change and its impact on ecological factors should be analyzed on different spatial scales. [PERSON] and [PERSON] designed the research; [PERSON] and [PERSON] performed the experiments and wrote the paper; [PERSON] corrected and modified the manuscript. This research was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.41771438, No.41701637 and No.41671405) and the Youth Science Foundation of Xinyang normal university (2016-QN-046). The authors declare no conflict of interest. * (16) [PERSON]; [PERSON]; [PERSON]; [PERSON] Carbon dioxide flux and net primary production of a boreal treed bog: Responses to warming and water table manipulations. _Biogeosci. Discuss._**2014**, _11_, 12937-12983. [CrossRef]
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