Local-scale secondary water resources modulate seasonal water limitation across Africa

Drylands contribute strongly to global biogeochemical cycles and their variability. While precipitation is the main driver of plant water availability, secondary water resources like shallow groundwater and lateral convergence of soil moisture may play important roles in supporting ecosystems against water limitation at the local scale. Despite their strong relevance, the effects of secondary water resources are often ignored or highly uncertain in studies over large spatial domains. 

Here, we aimed to quantify the degree to which land properties control secondary water resources over water-limited regions in Africa. To do so, we first detected the seasonal decay periods of Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) time series from the changes in FVC over time at daily temporal resolution. FVC data is provided by the EUMETSAT from the image acquisitions from the geostationary satellite MSG. We then calculated the seasonal decay rate of FVC (λ) and used it with other climate, land and vegetation properties at 5 km spatial resolution. We hypothesized that any secondary water resource should slow down vegetation decays in drylands. We used gradient boosting machine learning to model λ and constrained the model according to the hypothesis. Finally, we used Shapley additive explanations in order to quantify the effects of land properties on spatial variation of the modelled λ.

Model output (NSE = 0.55) revealed that over drylands of Africa, ∼1/3 of spatial variation of λ is attributed to land properties, half of which is attributed to direct land effects while the rest is attributed to the land interactions with climate and vegetation. Though at local scales, this attribution gets much stronger over hotspots with strong secondary water resources, i.e., shallow groundwater. Spatially, land attributed variations of λ show that vegetation decays slower in regions with shallow groundwater and faster in regions where land surface is disconnected from the groundwater. Topographic complexity is another important factor, with slower vegetation decay in complex terrain, likely due to enhanced lateral moisture convergence. Moreover, these responses intensify with increasing climatological water limitation. 

We found strong effects of land parameters on seasonal vegetation decay rate, spatially structured but at local scales. This highlights the importance of local scale processes affecting water availability in drylands not only at local but also continental to global scales and shows the need of bridging processes across spatial scales in regional-to-global hydrological and vegetation models.