ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Informatics and Remote Sensing
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1693677
Quantifying Utility-Scale Photovoltaic Impacts on Eastern Tibetan Alpine Grasslands Through RSEI and LSTM Approaches
Provisionally accepted
- 1Sichuan Branch of China Huadian Corporation Ltd., Chengdu, China
- 2Chengdu institute of biology, Chinese academy of sciences, Chengdu, China
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Utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) are expanding across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, yet their ecological consequences for alpine grasslands remain poorly quantified. We integrated the Remote-Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to examine spatiotemporal responses of alpine grasslands to a 1.2 GW PV plant constructed in 2016. The results indicated that relative to the pre-construction period (1990-2015), the mean RSEI within PV system increased significantly by 33.4 % (p < 0.01) in the post-construction period (2016-2024), and the proportion of pixels exhibiting positive RSEI anomalies rose from 44.1 % to 77.6 %. Ecological improvements propagated beyond the panel arrays, producing statistically significant effects (p < 0.05) within 120 m and detectable influences up to 720 m. Elevation and slope modulated the magnitude of these spill-over effects. Our findings demonstrate that PV system can enhance grassland quality in this alpine region and provide a transferable framework for evaluating renewable-energy impacts in fragile ecosystems.
Keywords: grassland ecosystem, Solar photovoltaic system, Remote sensing image, Ecological impact, LSTM model
Received: 27 Aug 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Yang, Li, Yang, Zhang, Xia, Ren and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yingnan Zhao, zhaoyn@cib.ac.cn
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