Warming and disturbances affect Arctic-boreal vegetation resilience across northwestern North America

Abstract

Rapid warming and increasing disturbances in high-latitude regions have caused extensive vegetation shifts and uncertainty in future carbon budgets. Better predictions of vegetation dynamics and functions require characterizing resilience, which indicates the capability of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations. Here, using temporal autocorrelation of remotely sensed greenness, we quantify time-varying vegetation resilience during 2000–2019 across northwestern North American Arctic-boreal ecosystems. We find that vegetation resilience significantly decreased in southern boreal forests, including forests showing greening trends, while it increased in most of the Arctic tundra. Warm and dry areas with high elevation and dense vegetation cover were among the hotspots of reduced resilience. Resilience further declined both before and after forest losses and fires, especially in southern boreal forests. These findings indicate that warming and disturbance have been altering vegetation resilience, potentially undermining the expected long-term increase of high-latitude carbon uptake under future climate.