Fig. 1: Variations and trends of vegetation growth proxies and terrestrial water storages.

a–d Spatial distribution of trends regarding the monthly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), terrestrial water storage anomaly (TWSA), ERA root zone soil moisture (RZSM), and ESA surface soil moisture (SSM), respectively, based on monthly Seasonal and Trend decomposition using Loess (STL)-decomposed components (see Supplementary Figs. 2 and 3 for complementary vegetation growth inferred from other indicators). The magenta contours indicate the dryland boundaries, and the cross mark denotes values significant at the 95% level. The white indicates no available data or bare lands. In each trend distribution map, the boxplots in the bottom left show the magnitude of trend over different types of drylands where HA, A, SA, and DSH are short for hyper-arid, arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid, respectively; the green or blue lines denote medium values, and boxes and whiskers represent 25−75% and 5−95% percentiles. The plot in the right shows the mean (solid line) and the standard deviation (shading) of zonal mean trend of dryland. e, f Decadal trends of vegetation growth and terrestrial water storages based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD)-decomposed components of region-specific time series. The trend was measured with the Sen’s slope and Mann–Kendall test. Only values significant at the 95% level are shown.