The resilience of global groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDEs) declined less than non-GDEs in the last forty years under differentiated spatial driving forces

Understanding the spatiotemporal variations and driving forces of groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) resilience can provide scientific evidence for GDEs protection under natural and anthropogenic perturbations. However, the differences in the spatiotemporal variations of GDEs and non-GDEs resilience and their responses to climatic and anthropogenic disturbances are still unclear. Here, we applied lag-1 month temporal autocorrelation (AR(1)) based on kernel Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (kNDVI) to explore the spatiotemporal pattern of GDEs and non-GDEs resilience, and used propensity score matching (PSM) to identify the difference. XGBoost and Shapley model are applied to spatially quantify the marginal contributions from each single drivers. We found that over a third of both GDEs and non-GDEs experienced a shift from an increasing to a declining resilience trend from 1982 to 2022, with the resilience decline in GDEs being 7.5% slower than in non-GDEs. GDEs resilience are mostly responsive to precipitation and VPD, while non-GDEs resilience are mostly responsive to temperature and PET variations. Plant biodiversity significantly boosts GDEs resilience, which has a different impacting threshold compared with non-GDEs resilience. The impact of stocking density on resilience is much higher in GDEs than in non-GDEs. These findings highlight the urgent need for policy interventions to protect and manage groundwater and plant biodiversity in GDEs to maintain its resilience.