Regional Climate Stressors and Their Differential Impact on Vegetation Response in Peninsular India’s Forest Ecosystems

While global climate change is a critical concern, its regional impacts on terrestrial ecosystems remain poorly understood. Primary abiotic drivers like temperature and soil moisture are key in shaping vegetation response and distribution, but global warming is expected to amplify their variability, alter frequencies, and disrupt interactions. This creates significant uncertainty regarding their effects on ecosystems. It is unclear whether vegetation responses will be uniform or exhibit contrasting patterns, potentially shifting mean values, distribution, variability, and ecosystem resilience. Understanding these dynamics is vital for predicting ecological outcomes and informing effective mitigation and adaptation strategies.

In this study, satellite observations of vegetation health from 2004 to 2022 are used to assess ecosystem sensitivity to climate stressors across forest ecosystems in Peninsular India, focusing on Deciduous and Evergreen Plant Functional Types (PFTs) in the Eastern and Western Ghats. Our analysis highlights soil moisture (SM) as a primary driver of vegetation productivity, while temperature anomalies, especially during the critical pre-monsoon months (February to May), play a significant role in explaining productivity anomalies, exerting distinct and variable influences across these months. Consequently, these months should be prioritized when assessing temperature-related risks. Regional and PFT-specific interactions with Temperature and Soil Moisture are crucial, with temperature anomalies having a more significant impact in the Eastern Ghats (EG) compared to the Western Ghats (WG), and the influence of SM being greater for deciduous than evergreen PFTs. Additionally, the strength of the response varies across different quantiles, revealing unequal sensitivity and variation in vegetation response throughout the distribution.

Our findings suggest that increased extreme weather events will likely enhance heterogeneous vegetation response and underscores the need for region-specific, adaptive strategies to mitigate the complex and uneven impacts of climate variability on ecosystem productivity.