Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Global forests are gaining productivity while losing resilience, yet the mechanisms underlying this divergence remain unclear. Here we show, using multi-source remote sensing data spanning 2001–2021, that over one-third of global forests simultaneously gain gross primary productivity and lose resilience, linked to shifts in ecosystem functional coupling. Rising vapour pressure deficit was the primary driver of resilience loss. This resilience erosion weakened the coupling between gross primary productivity and ecosystem photosynthetic efficiency in boreal forests. By contrast, vapour pressure deficit directly strengthened gross primary productivity-water use efficiency covariation in tropical and boreal forests. This tighter coupling reflects stomatal constraint on transpiration variability rather than improved carbon-water coordination. In intact forests, vapour pressure deficit instead weakened this coupling. Non-intact forests were twice as sensitive to resilience loss as intact forests, indicating that structural simplification disproportionately amplifies climate-driven vulnerability to atmospheric aridity. These findings call for integrating resilience and functional coupling into forest monitoring to safeguard carbon sink stability.
Institutions: Wuhan University, State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying Mapping and Remote Sensing, University of Oxford, Louisiana State University, Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, Peking University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Harvard University, China University of Mining and Technology, Université de Montréal, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Curtin University, University of the Witwatersrand, Istanbul Technical University
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDGs: Climate action, Life on land
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,490
Awards: G2352418083, G4479704874
OpenAlex ID: W7212172039
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