Anthropogenic disturbance exacerbates resilience loss in the Amazon rainforests

Abstract

Uncovering the mechanisms that lead to Amazon forest resilience variations is crucial to predict the impact of future climatic and anthropogenic disturbances. Here, we apply a previously used empirical resilience metrics, lag‐1 month temporal autocorrelation (TAC), to vegetation optical depth data in C‐band (a good proxy of the whole canopy water content) in order to explore how forest resilience variations are impacted by human disturbances and environmental drivers in the Brazilian Amazon. We found that human disturbances significantly increase the risk of critical transitions, and that the median TAC value is ~2.4 times higher in human‐disturbed forests than that in intact forests, suggesting a much lower resilience in disturbed forests. Additionally, human‐disturbed forests are less resilient to land surface heat stress and atmospheric water stress than intact forests. Among human‐disturbed forests, forests with a more closed and thicker canopy structure, which is linked to a higher forest cover and a lower disturbance fraction, are comparably more resilient. These results further emphasize the urgent need to limit deforestation and degradation through policy intervention to maintain the resilience of the Amazon rainforests.

Spatial Correlation Increase in Single‐Sensor Satellite Data Reveals Loss of Amazon Rainforest Resilience

“…Thus, to avoid misinterpreting HLU changes after 2020 (DeArmond et al, 2023;INPE, 2023) as resilience changes, we only analyze pre-2020 years. In particular, Wang et al (2024) recently showed that anthropogenic influence highly affects resilience in the ARF. Thus, to be as rigorous and conservative as possible, we also exclude any cell with more than one percent forest loss during 2001-2020, using the values from Hansen et al (2013).…”

Unveiling the landscape predictors of resilient vegetation in coastal wetlands to inform conservation in the face of climate extremes

“…As landscapes are increasingly altered by human activities, a predictive understanding of how areas with high vegetation resilience are impacted by human activities can inform conservation efforts, such as protected area (PA) planning and management, especially in the face of increasing climate extremes (Wang et al, 2024;Wilson et al, 2020). One of the most widespread human impacts on ecosystems is land conversion, which can affect vegetation climate resilience by intentionally or unintentionally converting areas with high vegetation resilience, by influencing natural landscape features, or by reducing habitat heterogeneity (Nimmo et al, 2015).…”