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Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening

Abstract

Vegetation greenness has been increasing globally since at least 1981, when satellite technology enabled large-scale vegetation monitoring. The greening phenomenon, together with warming, sea-level rise and sea-ice decline, represents highly credible evidence of anthropogenic climate change. In this Review, we examine the detection of the greening signal, its causes and its consequences. Greening is pronounced over intensively farmed or afforested areas, such as in China and India, reflecting human activities. However, strong greening also occurs in biomes with low human footprint, such as the Arctic, where global change drivers play a dominant role. Vegetation models suggest that CO2 fertilization is the main driver of greening on the global scale, with other factors being notable at the regional scale. Modelling indicates that greening could mitigate global warming by increasing the carbon sink on land and altering biogeophysical processes, mainly evaporative cooling. Coupling high temporal and fine spatial resolution remote-sensing observations with ground measurements, increasing sampling in the tropics and Arctic, and modelling Earth systems in more detail will further our insights into the greening of Earth.

Key points

  • Long-term satellite records reveal a significant global greening of vegetated areas since the 1980s, which recent data suggest has continued past 2010.

  • Pronounced greening is observed in China and India due to afforestation and agricultural intensification.

  • Global vegetation models suggest that CO2 fertilization is the main driver of global vegetation greening.

  • Warming is the major cause of greening in boreal and Arctic biomes, but has negative effects on greening in the tropics.

  • Greening was found to mitigate global warming through enhanced land carbon uptake and evaporative cooling, but might also lead to decreased albedo that could potentially cause local warming.

  • Greening enhances transpiration, a process that reduces soil moisture and runoff locally, but can either amplify or reduce runoff and soil moisture regionally through altering the pattern of precipitation.

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Fig. 1: Changes in satellite-derived global vegetation indices, vegetation optical depth and contiguous solar-induced fluorescence.
Fig. 2: Spatial patterns of changes in leaf area index.
Fig. 3: Changes in the seasonality of vegetation greenness and atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Fig. 4: Attribution of trends in growing season mean leaf area index.
Fig. 5: Current and predicted global leaf area index.
Fig. 6: Changes in global carbon fluxes and seasonal CO2 amplitude.
Fig. 7: Biogeophysical feedbacks of recent vegetation greening to the climate system.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41861134036, 41988101) and the Research Council of Norway (287402), the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0604702), Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0208) and the Thousand Youth Talents Plan project in China. The works of C.C., R.B.M. and T.P. were funded by NASA’s Earth Science Division. R.B.M. also acknowledges support by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. P.C. acknowledges support by the European Research Council Synergy project (SyG- 2013-610028 IMBALANCE-P) and the ANR CLAND Convergence Institute. The authors thank Z. Zhu, Y. Li, K. Wang, Y. Deng, M. Gao and X. Li for their help in preparing the manuscript.

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S.P., X.W., T.P., C.C., X.L., Y.H., J.W.B., A.C., P.C., H.T. and R.B.M. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. S.P., X.W. and R.B.M. reviewed and edited the manuscript before submission. All authors made substantial contributions to the discussion of content.

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Correspondence to Shilong Piao.

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EnMAP: http://www.enmap.org

FLEX: https://Earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-future-missions/flex

FLUXNET: https://fluxnet.fluxdata.org

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PEP725: http://www.pep725.eu

PhenoCam: http://www.phenocam.us

Supplementary Information

Glossary

Afforestation

The conversion of treeless lands to forests through planting trees.

Land-surface phenology

Cyclic phenomena in vegetated land surfaces observed from remote sensing.

Carboxylation

The addition of CO2 to ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate during photosynthesis.

Evapotranspiration

The flux of water emitted from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere. It is the sum of evaporation by the soil, wet canopy, open-water surfaces and transpiration by plant stomata.

Transpiration

The loss of water from plants to the atmosphere.

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Piao, S., Wang, X., Park, T. et al. Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening. Nat Rev Earth Environ 1, 14–27 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-019-0001-x

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