Fig. 5: The relationship between distance to human activity and vegetation resilience.

a, VOD AR(1) time series for 50 km bands measuring the minimum distance a forested grid cell is from a grid cell with human land use (defined in the Methods from the MODIS Land Cover product), from 1996 (dashed lines, these include data going back to 1991 due to the 5-yr sliding windows used to estimate the AR(1)) and from 2003 (solid lines, including data going back to 1998), with the significance of these respective tendencies shown in the legend (Methods). b, VOD AR(1) Kendall τ series for the sliding 50 km bands, from 1996 (grey, again including data going back to 1991) and from 2003 (black, including data going back to 1998). Circles are coloured according to the corresponding time series in a and are filled if the Kendall τ value is significantly positive (P < 0.05) and open otherwise. The tendencies of these relationships are τ = −0.574 (grey) and τ = −0.858 (black), showing that there is a more severe decrease in resilience with increasing proximity to human land use. The number of grid cells used to calculate the AR(1) time series and thus the Kendall τ values are shown in red in b, with vertical dotted lines denoting where there are 100 and 50 grid cells available for the calculation. The number of grid cells used in the calculation of the time series in a is shown in brackets in the legend. c,d, The same as a and b, respectively, but for the subset of grid cells in Brazil, where reliable road data are available (as shown in Supplementary Fig. 10). For this case, where the distances from any given forested grid cell to human land use or roads are computed, the trends in the Kendall τ series are τ = −0.688 and τ = −0.679, respectively.