Long-term effects of climatic and hydrological variation on natural vegetation production and characteristics in a semiarid watershed: The northern Negev, Israel.

Climate models for semiarid and arid regions predict increasing average temperatures and reduced amounts of total annual rainfall. This warming and drying trend could have critical, adverse effects on natural vegetation activity and survival in arid and semiarid zones. We investigated the long-term effects of climate change and surface-runoff variations on the production of natural vegetation in a dry, undisturbed, first-order watershed in the northern Negev, Israel. Vegetation dynamics were estimated by normalized difference vegetation index. Yearly annual vegetation cover varied greatly during the monitoring period (2000-2013), but a significant positive regression was found with annual rainfall and runoff amounts, suggesting a strong relationship between annual vegetation dynamics and rainfall amount in a given year. A significant positive linear regression was found between annual ET

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.