Analysis of global vegetation resilience under different future climate scenarios

Terrestrial ecosystems are experiencing notable changes due to global change, making it crucial to determine their future responses under different climate scenarios. In previous theories, it has been proposed that resilience, which reflects the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances such as drought and wildfires, can serve as an indicator of the ecosystem structure and function. In this study, we applied ecosystem resilience as a metric to assess the state of terrestrial ecosystems. Our analysis revealed a positive trend in vegetation growth across different climate scenarios. Additionally, SSP5-8.5 having the least masked areas exhibits the smallest uncertainties among the considered scenarios. We further examined the theoretical recovery rates based on variance and lag-1 auto-correlation (AC1) to quantify resilience, considering three future periods (near-term, mid-term, and long-term). The theoretical recovery rates decrease from the near-term to the long-term, while larger uncertainties are observed in the long-term compared to the near-term. Notably, equatorial regions experience a significant degradation in resilience, despite the anticipated increase in vegetation growth. Our study highlights the complex dynamics between vegetation growth and ecosystem resilience, disentangling the resilience change of terrestrial ecosystems in the face of global change.