扩展阅读
Critical slowing down is commonly used as an early-warning signature of declining ecosystem resilience. While widespread greening has been documented, vegetation resilience in semiarid regions has received limited attention, and how climate extremes influence this association remains poorly understood. Here, we quantify vegetation resilience by estimating lag-1 temporal autocorrelation derived from complementary satellite vegetation metrics across global semiarid regions. We find that 56.6% of semiarid vegetated area shows increasing lag-1 temporal autocorrelation, and the spatial mean lag-1 temporal autocorrelation exhibits a sustained upward trend during 2001–2024, indicating declining resilience. Using a quadrant framework, 47.5% of vegetated area is classified as greening concurrent with declining resilience, exceeding the 33.8% showing greening with increasing resilience. Moreover, heatwaves intensified, and precipitation declined, with trend magnitudes and land-cover composition varying among greening–resilience quadrants. Spatial error models indicate that increases in maximum heatwave intensity are more strongly associated with declining resilience under drying trends, whereas this association weakens under wetting. Within-quadrant analyses further characterize conditional associations, consistent with greening–resilience decoupling under hot–dry intensification. Our findings suggest that greening can mask declining resilience, underscoring the need to integrate resilience diagnostics into routine greenness monitoring as climate extremes intensify.
Funding This work was supported by the Fundamental and Interdisciplinary Disciplines Breakthrough Plan of the Ministry of Education of China (JYB2025XDXM910 to J.H.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32225032 to J.D.), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFF0805602 to J.D.), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2025M782643 to L.F.), the Lanzhou Special Fund for Talent Program awarded to J.H., and the 111 Project (B25040 to J.H.). Author information Authors and Affiliations State Key Laboratory of Herbage Improvement and Grassland Agro-Ecosystems, College of Ecology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China Li Fu & Jianming Deng Collaborative Innovation Center for Western Ecological Safety, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China Li Fu, Jianping Huang, Changyu Li & Guolong Zhang Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education, College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China Wenmin Wei, Ming Peng & Yu Ren Corresponding author Correspondence to Jianping Huang. Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Additional information Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary information Supplementary Information (download PDF ) Peer Review file (download PDF ) Reporting Summary (download PDF ) Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.