Abstract
Flash drought (faster-developing drought) has been pervasively intensified, posing detrimental constraints on vegetation productivity. However, the potential expansion of flash droughts from flash drought hotspots to non-hotspots and its associated risks to vegetation productivity remain unknown. Furthermore, the divergence in the underlying drivers governing vegetation productivity responses to flash and slow droughts (slower-developing droughts) is unclear. We quantify the dominant drivers underlying vegetation productivity resilience (the departure of productivity anomalies after drought effect to the long-term mean) to both flash and slow droughts. There exhibits significantly lower productivity resilience to flash drought at flash drought hotspots than non-hotspots (Δ = −0.07 ± 0.02, t = −3.25, p < 0.001). The productivity resilience to flash drought is more sensitive to the same reduction in productivity anomaly and intensified climate stress than slow drought. Carbon dioxide fertilization effect exerts the greatest positive effect on productivity resilience to both flash and slow droughts, although that effect is smaller under flash droughts. Our study underscores the limited global ecosystem resilience to the intensification and spread of flash droughts.
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Data availability
All gridded vegetation and climate datasets are freely accessible at the following websites: the gridded global daily GPP dataset was obtained from the FluxSat dataset (https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/catalog/ornl-cloud-fluxsat-gpp-fpar-1835-2). The gridded global 4-day SIF data was obtained from the CSIF dataset (https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/CSIF/6387494). The daily soil moisture, precipitation, temperature, dew point temperature, evaporation, and radiation data were derived from the ERA5_Land (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-land?tab=overview). The daily soil moisture data and snow water equivalent were obtained from the GLDAS dataset (https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets?keywords=GLDAS). Future daily soil moisture data were obtained from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (https://aims2.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/). Fluxnet site observations were obtained from the FLUXNET2015 dataset (https://fluxnet.org/data/fluxnet2015-dataset/). The soil cation exchange capacity data was obtained from the Regridded Harmonized World Soil Database v.1.2 (https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/catalog/ornl-cloud-hwsd-1247-1). The gridded canopy height data was obtained from the global 1-km canopy height dataset of the ORNL DAAC platform (https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/centers/ornl-daac). The maximum rooting depth was obtained from the Global Earth Observation for Integrated Water Resource Assessment project (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/603608). Tree density data was obtained from a global tree density map (https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_fes_data/1/). Daily atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration observation dataset was obtained from Global Monitoring Laboratory platform (https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/). Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The codes used to generate the main results are available at the Code Ocean platform https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.0939560.v1.
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Acknowledgments
This project was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFF0801802, Xiuchen Wu) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42171050, Xiuchen Wu).
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X.C.W. conceived the scientific idea. R.J.G., X.C.W., P.W., T.X.C., C.X., and J.T.C. developed the methodology and designed the experiments. R.J.G. conducted data analyses and visualized results. R.J.G. and X.C.W. wrote the original draft with suggestions from P.W., T.X.C., and X.C. X.N.W., Z.F.Z., Z.K.M., and Y.R.L. contributed to a large part of the pre-processing of datasets. All authors contributed to the results interpretation and editing of the manuscript.
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Guo, R., Wu, X., Wang, P. et al. Increased spread of global flash droughts threatens vegetation productivity resilience. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70417-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70417-z
