TY  - JOUR
A1  - Smith, Taylor
A1  - Traxl, Dominik
A1  - Boers, Niklas
T1  - Empirical evidence for recent global shifts in vegetation resilience
JF  - Nature climate change
N2  - The authors demonstrate that a vegetation system's ability to recover from disturbances-its resilience-can be estimated from its natural variability. Global patterns of resilience loss and gains since the early 1990s reveal shifts towards widespread resilience loss since the early 2000s. 
The character and health of ecosystems worldwide is tightly coupled to changes in Earth's climate. Theory suggests that ecosystem resilience-the ability of ecosystems to resist and recover from external shocks such as droughts and fires-can be inferred from their natural variability. Here, we quantify vegetation resilience globally with complementary metrics based on two independent long-term satellite records. We first empirically confirm that the recovery rates from large perturbations can be closely approximated from internal vegetation variability across vegetation types and climate zones. On the basis of this empirical relationship, we quantify vegetation resilience continuously and globally from 1992 to 2017. Long-term vegetation resilience trends are spatially heterogeneous, with overall increasing resilience in the tropics and decreasing resilience at higher latitudes. Shorter-term trends, however, reveal a marked shift towards a global decline in vegetation resilience since the early 2000s, particularly in the equatorial rainforest belt.
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01352-2
SN  - 1758-678X
SN  - 1758-6798
VL  - 12
IS  - 5
SP  - 477
EP  - 484
PB  - Nature Publ. Group
CY  - London
ER  -