Climate change has far-reaching impacts on ecosystems. Recent attempts to quantify such impacts focus on measuring exposure to climate change but largely ignore ecosystem resistance and resilience, which may also affect the vulnerability outcomes. In this study, the relative vulnerability of global terrestrial ecosystems to short-term climate variability was assessed by simultaneously integrating exposure, sensitivity, and resilience at a high spatial resolution (0.05°). The results show that vulnerable areas are currently distributed primarily in plains. Responses to climate change vary among ecosystems and deserts and xeric shrublands are the most vulnerable biomes. Global vulnerability patterns are determined largely by exposure, while ecosystem sensitivity and resilience may exacerbate or alleviate external climate pressures at local scales; there is a highly significant negative correlation between exposure and sensitivity. Globally, 61.31% of the terrestrial vegetated area is capable of mitigating climate change impacts and those areas are concentrated in polar regions, boreal forests, tropical rainforests, and intact forests. Under current sensitivity and resilience conditions, vulnerable areas are projected to develop in high Northern Hemisphere latitudes in the future. The results suggest that integrating all three aspects of vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity, and resilience) may offer more comprehensive and spatially explicit adaptation strategies to reduce the impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems.

Memory effects refer to the impacts of antecedent climate conditions on current vegetation productivity. This temporal linkage has been found to be strong in arid and semi-arid regions. However, the dominant climatic factors that determine such patterns are still unclear. Here, we defined’water-memory effects’ as the persistent effects of antecedent precipitation on the vegetation productivity for a given memory length (from 1 to up to 12 months). Based on satellite observations and climate data, we quantified the length of water-memory effects and evaluated the contributions of antecedent precipitation on current vegetation. Our results showed that vegetation productivity was highly dependent on antecedent precipitation in arid and semi-arid regions. The average length of water memory was approximately 5.6 months. Globally, water-memory effects could explain the geographical pattern and strength of memory effects, indicating that precipitation might be the dominant climatic factor determining memory effects because of its impact on water availability. Moreover, our results showed vegetation in regions with low mean annual precipitation or a longer water memory has lower engineering resilience (i.e. slower recovery rate) to disturbances. These findings will enable better assessment of memory effects and improve our understanding of the vulnerability of vegetation to climate change.

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