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Satellite data show declining global forest recovery from tree mortality since the 1990s, driven by warming and water scarcity. Canopy water recovers slower than greenness, stressing the need for a multifaceted approach to assessing recovery.

Vegetation in arid regions benefits from higher leaf-scale assimilation rates and expanded leaf area, boosting carbon uptake, while productive forests and croplands experience declines due to increased shading and climate stress, based on remote sensing data and multiple process-based models.

Satellite records combined with global ecosystem models show a persistent and widespread greening over 25–50% of the global vegetated area; less than 4% of the globe is browning. CO₂ fertilization explains 70% of the observed greening trend.

Observed northern extratropical land greening is consistent with anthropogenic forcings, where greenhouse gases play a dominant role, but not with simulations that include only natural forcings and internal climate variability.

Remotely sensed vegetation and water-balance measurements from 190 river basins across Australia show that sub-humid and semi-arid basins are ‘greening’—as expected under CO₂ fertilization—increasing water consumption and reducing streamflow.

Using multiple remote-sensing datasets, the authors show that temporal and spatial scale influence the detection of tree-mortality events and explain why there has been a seemingly conflicting pattern of both overall greening but also extensive tree mortality in recent decades.

Remote sensing often detects higher vegetation greenness for croplands than for forests, despite forests having a greater leaf area. This study shows that this is an artefact of shadows caused by forest structures and explores how to correct for this when interpreting global vegetation change data.

A comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of vegetation maximum gross primary production is lacking. Here the authors show that the seasonal peak photosynthesis is hindered by late canopy development due to climatic and nutrient limitations.

2024 witnessed record-high global vegetation greenness, far outpacing the previous high set in 2020. A total of 67.7% of vegetated land surfaces experienced greening, notably in Eurasian and tropical grasslands, and global croplands.

Cloud cover and scarcity of ground-based validation hinder remote sensing of forest dynamics in the Amazon basin. Here, the authors analyse imagery from a high-frequency geostationary satellite sensor to study monthly NDVI patterns in the Amazon forest, finding support for spatially extensive seasonality.

Pronounced increases in winter temperature result in lower seasonal temperature differences, with implications for vegetation seasonality and productivity. Research now indicates that temperature and vegetation seasonality in northern ecosystems have diminished to an extent equivalent to a southerly shift of 4°– 7° in latitude, and may reach the equivalent of up to 20° over the twenty-first century.

Low-frequency vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) sensing reveals global patterns of seasonal variations in ecosystem-scale plant water storage and relationships with leaf phenology; results vary between tropical and temperate–boreal zones.

A database and viewer is described, resulting from the assessment of the carbon stock of over 9 billion individual trees in semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa using field data, machine learning, satellite data and high-performance computing.

Recent warming has significantly advanced leaf onset in the northern hemisphere. Here, the authors show asymmetric effects of daytime and nighttime temperature change on the timing of leaf onset.

Northern Hemisphere photosynthesis is thought to respond positively to temperature variations, yet the strength of this relationship may change over time. Here, using a combination of satellite data and models, the authors assess the temporal change of this relationship over the past three decades.

Vegetation on Earth is increasing, potentially leading to a larger terrestrial carbon sink. In this Review, we discuss the occurrence of this global greening phenomenon, its drivers and how it might impact carbon cycling and land-atmosphere heat and water fluxes.

The future of terrestrial systems is influenced by their past, but this carryover effect is rarely quantified. Here, the authors provide the first quantitative evidence that a greener spring begets a greener summer and autumn, and that this carryover effect is even stronger than climate drivers.

Forests of the Amazon Basin have experienced frequent and severe droughts in recent years with significant impacts on their carbon cycling. Here, using satellite LiDAR samples from 2003 to 2008, the authors show the long-term legacy of these droughts with persistent loss of carbon stocks after the 2005 drought.

Since the early 1980s, remotely sensed data has shown the Earth to be slowly greening. Climate change, CO₂ fertilization and land-use change are competing explanations. Using satellite data from 2000–2017, this study finds striking greening of both China and India, driven primarily by land-use change, with forest growth and cropland intensification more important in China and cropland more important in India.

Combining eddy covariance measurements and satellite observations, the authors identify an optimum air temperature for global vegetation productivity and show that it is consistently lower than the optimum foliar photosynthetic capacity.

The terrestrial biosphere absorbs a large fraction of emitted CO₂, and thus, plays a critical role in climate change projections. Here, the authors use satellite leaf area and in-situ CO₂ measurements to show that most Earth system models largely underestimate photosynthetic carbon fixation in high latitudes.

Accelerated storage of terrestrial carbon during the slow warming period (1998–2012) can be predominantly attributed to lower land-use emissions due to decreased tropical forest loss and increased afforestation in the northern temperate regions.

Here the concept of climate-change velocity is used to explore whether northward displacement of vegetation will keep pace with temperature under climate change. Remote sensing data suggest it will not, possibly due to resource availability.

Plant growing season increases under a warming climate, but it is not known whether this will alter plant exposure to frost days. Here Liu et al. investigate trends in the Northern Hemisphere over 30 years and find increased exposure to frost days in regions that have longer growing seasons.

Since 2000, China has attempted to vegetate huge portions of eroded landscape in its south west, bordering Vietman, Laos, and Myanmar. This study finds that this ecological engineering is combating desertification as vegetation regrows and stores carbon.

Global greening continued into 2023, reaching near-record values that were dominated by regional enhancement in the mid-western USA, Europe, northern Australia and parts of equatorial Africa. In contrast, climatic events contributed to browning signals in Russia, Canada, Mexico and tropical drylands.

Tropical carbon stocks are essential for proper accounting of global carbon budgets, but difficult to monitor on a large scale. L-band microwave observations used here enable direct and spatially explicit accounting of annual carbon fluxes from different types of land surface.

Rising pre-season daytime and night-time temperatures have contrasting effects on the timing of autumn-leaf senescence date in the Northern Hemisphere. Diurnal differences in drought stress may be the underlying mechanism.

The long-term record of atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rate shows that the sensitivity of this growth rate to tropical temperature variability has increased by a factor of about two in the past five decades, and was greater when tropical land regions experienced drier conditions, implying that moisture regulates this sensitivity.

The unusually large land carbon sink reported in 2011 can mostly be attributed to semi-arid vegetation growth in the Southern Hemisphere following increased rainfall and long-term greening trends.

Correlations between the maximum and minimum daily temperatures and a vegetation index in the Northern Hemisphere suggest that asymmetric diurnal warming (faster warming of the land surface during the night than during the day) produces several different vegetation and carbon storage effects.

Atmospheric CO₂ concentration measurements at Barrow, Alaska, together with coupled atmospheric transport and terrestrial ecosystem models show a declining spring net primary productivity response to temperature at high latitudes.

The long-term drying trend in central African rainforests might help to explain satellite-detected large-scale vegetation browning in the Congolese forests.

Greening—increasing leaf area index—affects regional climate in a number of contradictory ways. The net global effect is now revealed to be cooling that has offset the equivalent of 12% of global land-surface warming over the past 30 years.

Global warming accelerated canopy senescence in July, but slowed it in late summer and early fall in the Northern Hemisphere, according to an analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index satellite retrievals over 1982–2018

The direct and seasonally-lagged effects of compound weather and climate events in spring on vegetation productivity vary with latitude and can amplify the effects of individual weather events, according to observationally-constrained estimates and process-based terrestrial ecosystem models.