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Abstract

Understanding how vegetation resilience responds to climate change is crucial for maintaining ecosystem functions. This study focuses on forest and grassland ecosystems and uses theoretical recovery rate as a measure to assess climate impacts on their resilience over China. Our findings reveal that vegetation resilience varies across aridity-dependent climate zones, with each zone showing different resilience–aridity relationships. Particularly, semi-arid zones exhibit the lowest vegetation resilience, where the forest resilience declines as inter-annual temperature and precipitation variability increases. In zones with sufficient water, the forest resilience remains stable. Grassland resilience decreases with increasing precipitation variability, but is insensitive to inter-annual temperature variability. Future projections highlight the potential threat of climate change to regions encompassing more than 20% of vegetated areas, particularly in the forest-grassland ecotones of North China. These findings enhance our understanding of climate-ecosystem interactions and support the anticipation and management of ecosystem risks under climate change.