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Abstract

Ecosystem resilience, the ability to recover from disturbances, is crucial for sustaining ecosystem health and functionality. Traditional greenness-based resilience measures often overlook early physiological stress. Here, we use solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), an indicator for photosynthesis, to assess global vegetation functional resilience from 2000 to 2019. Using indicators of critical slowing down, we derive recovery rates as a measure of resilience from variance and autocorrelation in SIF time series across natural vegetation. Our results reveal marked latitudinal contrasts, with faster recovery in boreal regions and persistent vulnerability in tropical and low-latitude ecosystems. Long-term trends show resilience loss in the Eurasian high latitudes, while short-term trends indicate accelerating resilience decline in 60.7% of the global tropics, driven by heat, vapor pressure deficit, and soil moisture stress. These findings highlights the need to monitor ecosystem functional resilience through physiological indicators to anticipate ecological tipping points and inform conservation and climate adaptation strategies.