Operational dual-track indicators for dryland greening quality and drought response: A Junggar Basin demonstration

Dryland greening is often treated as recovery success, yet greenness only describes vegetation state and does not measure the capacity to recover after drought. Treating greenness troughs as drought years, or ignoring the long-term rise in greenness, can overstate recovery and miss meteorological drought. This study develops a practical dual-track monitoring suite for inland oasis–desert landscapes, so greening quality and drought response can be reported separately rather than diagnosed as one global greening–resilience pattern. In the Junggar Basin, long-term greening is combined with a resilience-change metric to separate true-recovery greening from fragile greening. Meteorological drought years are identified independently; greenness is used only to measure impact and recovery time. Fragile greening covers more of the basin (17.8%) than true-recovery greening (11.8%), and more than half of significant greening is fragile. Meteorological drought years and vegetation-trough years seldom coincide. The two tracks are only weakly related, so one cannot be inferred from the other. Greening quality and drought response answer different questions and should be reported together: quadrant shares, a meteorological drought list, and post-drought recovery times, kept separate by oasis and land-use context.