Vegetation resilience is linked to moisture availability, temperature, biodiversity and canopy complexity

Assessing the spatial patterns and drivers of terrestrial ecosystem resilience is essential for understanding ecosystem responses to climate change and other environmental pressures. In this study, we investigate global vegetation resilience using long-term solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) observations from two independent satellite products. Resilience is quantified using metrics derived from lag-one autocorrelation (AC1) and variance within the framework of critical slowing down theory (CSD). We first evaluate the reliability of SIF-based resilience metrics by comparing them with empirically estimated recovery rates and infer that the SIF datasets are suitable for CSD-based resilience estimates. We further examine how climatic conditions and vegetation structural properties regulate and shape spatial variations in ecosystem resilience. Specifically, we find that water availability and canopy structural complexity show a positive relationship with vegetation resilience, whereas temperature shows a negative relationship with vegetation resilience. In addition, alpha diversity is positively related to resilience across most vegetation types, although this relationship is weak or absent in grassland ecosystems. These findings confirm the importance of climatic controls while highlighting the combined roles of biodiversity and ecosystem structural complexity in shaping terrestrial vegetation resilience. The resilience spatial patterns and mechanisms identified here provide new insights into ecosystem stability under ongoing climate change.