Prevalence and drivers of abrupt shifts in global drylands: gathering dynamical evidences of aridity thresholds

Drylands occupy 45% emerged lands on Earth, are home of more than 2 billion people and are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Aridity increases is expected to influence the structure and functioning of drylands in a non-linear fashion. Yet, the prevalence and drivers of these abrupt changes in ecosystem structure and function remain poorly studied. We especially lack investigations of the changes of dynamical properties of these systems and how these dynamical properties relate to aridity. Those are key to understand the real menace of experiencing abrupt shifts with aridity increases in the near future.

Here we used remote sensing tools to acquire dynamical trajectories of normalized vegetation indices (NDVI, surrogates of plant fractional cover) for more than 50,000 dryland sites. With this information we conducted analysis using machine learning processes to examine the relationship of aridity with some key dynamical properties of dryland ecosystems, including several aspects of resilience (ability to withstand fluctuations without changing the functioning of ecosystems), dynamical drivers of productivity, complexity of dynamical trajectories and abruptness of productivity changes.

By doing so we provide a comprehensive assessment of aridity thresholds on dynamical properties of dryland productivity that show clear vulnerability of certain zones of the Earth exhibiting critical aridity thresholds previously identified through space. In particular, we show accumulation of abrupt shifts on aridity values characteristic of transition areas from semiarid to arid ecosystems. Furthermore, these values exhibit also nonlinear shifts in resilience of ecosystems and on the identity of key dynamical drivers. Our work paves the way to expand the incidence of aridity threshold from spatial to temporal implications, and highlights the necessity of developing strategies to protect and monitor especially vulnerable areas affecting more than one fifth of emerged lands.