ET decline persistence and intensity metrics in South America: Upload for 'Evapotranspiration declines prolonged by deforestation and fire in South American biomes'

How quickly does vegetation return to its normal ET functioning across South America? Here, we quantify the impact of deforestation and fires (anthropogenic stresses) and droughts (environmental stresses) on ET response in the Amazon and surrounding biomes over the past two decades. Using a high-resolution Noah multi-parameterization (Noah-MP) land surface model constrained by satellite observations of LAI, soil moisture, and groundwater storage, and updated annually with landcover changes, we compute the Evaporative Stress Index (ESI), a normalized anomaly of ET relative to potential ET, at 1 km resolution from 2003-20. We introduce two novel metrics: intensity, the magnitude of ET decline, and persistence, the duration of reduction, to identify regional hotspots of sustained ET impacts.