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It has been widely accepted that high land use intensity contributes to sandy desertification in Northern China. However, it is surprising that it is even not easy to find an explicit definition and proper indicator for the term "land use intensity" in the sandy desertification related literatures. To better understand the association between sandy desertification and its driving factors, especially in the context of the synergistic roles of both climatic and anthropogenic variables, an indicator for land use intensity was developed in this paper for quantifying the relative role of land use output on different kinds of vegetation cover. The results indicated land use intensity increased rapidly from 1980 to 1995, obviously decreased from 1995 to 2000, and increased slowly after 2000 as a result of the continued increase of socioeconomic pressures and the fluctuating changes in vegetative cover.

An ARDL model was established and applied to analyze the correlation between the area of bare sand land and land use intensity with the influence of annual precipitation in temporal dimension. The area of bare sand land was significantly affected by land use intensity in the long run. However, in the short run, the area of bare sand land was mainly impacted by the auto-correlation effect of itself in temporal dimension and by the annual precipitation. The improvement of the sand dunes obviously reduced the risk of sandy desertification under the condition of specific land use intensity.

Before analyzing the correlation between land use intensity and sandy desertification, specific skills were applied to improve the model, including data interpolation and regression verification, since there would be regression biases resulting from the acquisition and processing of time-series data of different sources. Results showed that the area of bare sand land (S-t)and the land use intensity (LIt) were time-independent. Lag terms of these two variables were added to improve original model.

Changes in socioeconomic pressures and ecological restoration projects had obvious influences on land use intensity. Along with the steady increase of socioecological pressures on land and the changes in vegetative cover resulting from various ecological protection strategies and ecological restoration projects, shifts in land use intensity followed a different trend with the population and the socialeconomic demands. Nonetheless, the continuous increase of socioeconomic demands will increase land use intensity in the long run, so that the risk of sandy desertification remains high. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.