A pronounced decline in northern vegetation resistance to flash droughts from 2001 to 2022
Climate change has led to the transition of droughts into rapid and intensified phenomena known as flash droughts, presenting considerable challenges for risk management, particularly concerning their impact on ecosystem productivity. Quantifying the ecosystem's capacity to maintain productivity during flash droughts, referred to as ecosystem resistance, is crucial to assess drought impacts. However, it remains uncertain how the resistance of ecosystem productivity to flash drought changes over time. Here we show that vegetation resistance to flash droughts declines by up to 27% (±5%) over the Northern Hemisphere hotspots during 2001-2022, including eastern Asia, western North America, and northern Europe. The notable decline in vegetation resistance is mainly attributed to increased vapour pressure deficit and temperature, and enhanced vegetation structural sensitivity to water availability. Flash droughts pose higher ecological risks than slowly-developing droughts during the growing seasons, where ecosystem productivity experiences faster decline rates with a shorter response time. Our results underscore the limited ecosystem capacity to resist flash droughts under climate change.
Authors
- Trevor F. Keenan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3347-0258)
- Peili Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7908-7062)
- Miao Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9714-5932)
- Jingfeng Xiao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0622-6903)
- Zhenzhong Zeng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6851-2756)
- Xing Yuan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6983-7368)
- Ming Pan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7214-7429)
Institutions
- Met Office (GB)
- University of Nottingham Ningbo China (CN)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography (US)
- University of New Hampshire (US)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (CN)
- Southern University of Science and Technology (CN)
- State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering (CN)
- Institute of Atmospheric Physics (CN)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2025-03-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58253-z
- Citations
- 25
- Primary Topic
- Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 27.63
Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Met Office
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Nuclear Safety and Security Commission
- EarthLab, University of Washington
- National Key Research and Development Program of China