Arctic vegetation greening with impervious surface expansion from 1990 to 2018

Amid rapid Arctic climate change, vegetation greenness serves as a traceable indicator of terrestrial ecosystem change. However, Arctic greening is still widely framed as climate-driven, and spatially explicit long-term evidence quantifying how human activities modulate these trajectories remains scarce. Urban areas, as hotspots of intense human activity, offer a natural laboratory for disentangling background climate-driven forcing from local anthropogenic influences on vegetation dynamics. Here, we used Landsat observations from 1990 to 2018 to produce an annual dataset of man-made impervious surfaces for the Yamal‒Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO). The result reveals a 67% expansion, indicating rapid Arctic urbanization. NDVI max trends showed widespread greening, with greening pixels outnumbering browning ones by about 15-fold. Urban vegetation exhibited 17% higher greenness trends than rural regions (0.005 per decade). Using a conceptual model to decompose greenness trends, we found that large-scale environmental changes, representing background climate-driven forcing, were the dominant drivers (>50%) of Arctic urban greening across all urban areas. Indirect urbanization effects also substantially enhanced greenness trends. In contrast, direct impacts remained minimal (