English
 
Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Global vegetation resilience linked to water availability and variability

Authors

Smith,  Taylor
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/Niklas.Boers

Boers,  Niklas
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

External Ressource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (public)

28375oa.pdf
(Publisher version), 7MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Smith, T., Boers, N. (2023): Global vegetation resilience linked to water availability and variability. - Nature Communications, 14, 498.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36207-7


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_28375
Abstract
Quantifying the resilience of vegetated ecosystems is key to constraining both present-day and future global impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Here we apply both empirical and theoretical resilience metrics to remotely-sensed vegetation data in order to examine the role of water availability and variability in controlling vegetation resilience at the global scale. We find a concise global relationship where vegetation resilience is greater in regions with higher water availability. We also reveal that resilience is lower in regions with more pronounced inter-annual precipitation variability, but find less concise relationships between vegetation resilience and intra-annual precipitation variability. Our results thus imply that the resilience of vegetation responds differently to water deficits at varying time scales. In view of projected increases in precipitation variability, our findings highlight the risk of ecosystem degradation under ongoing climate change.