Monitoring Vegetation Dynamics in Desertification Restoration Areas of Wuzhumuqin Grassland Ecosystem

The desertified ecological restoration vegetation of Wuzhumuqin grassland plays an important role in the ecological restoration and protection of the region. However, there are few studies on the monitoring of the changes in ecological restoration vegetation in grassland sandy land in the past. In order to improve the low efficiency of ecological restoration vegetation monitoring, this study used Gaofen-6 (GF-6) remote sensing data to calculate the kernel Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (kNDVI) and vegetation coverage of ecological restoration vegetation and analyze their spatial and temporal trends. At the same time, a transform three-branch network structure based on deep learning is proposed to extract visual features. The kernel Normalized Difference Vegetation Index-position-temporal awareness transformer (kNDVI-PT-Former) model monitoring method based on two-phase remote sensing image features combined with kNDVI for spatio-temporal feature extraction can accurately obtain the vegetation changes in desertification ecological restoration in Wuzhumuqin grassland. The results show that the kNDVI of the study area shows an increasing trend from 2019 to 2024. The kNDVI value is 0.4086 in 2019 and 0.4927 in 2024. From the perspective of the change trend of vegetation coverage, the overall vegetation coverage of the Wuzhumuqin desertification restoration study area showed a gradual increase trend from 2019 to 2024, and the vegetation coverage increased by 19% in 2024 compared with 2019. The transformation of vegetation coverage from low level to high level in the study area is more prominent. Based on the self-built monitoring dataset of more than 5.2 million pairs of grassland vegetation changes, through model comparison and analysis, the kNDVI-PT-Former model obtains that the Class Pixel Accuracy (CPA) is 0.7295, the Intersection over Union (IoU) is 0.7228, and the overall monitoring accuracy of the model is improved by 11%. Furthermore, the stability of the model’s performance was confirmed through evaluation with five-fold cross-validation.