Global vegetation resilience linked to water availability and variability
University of Potsdam · University of Exeter · +2 more institutions
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…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 35.14
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 52
Authors
2Topics & keywords
- Vegetation (pathology)
- Resilience (materials science)
- Environmental science
- Precipitation
- Ecosystem
- Climate change
- Environmental resource management
- Psychological resilience