The character and health of ecosystems worldwide is tightly coupled to changes in Earth’s climate. Theory suggests that ecosystem resilience—the ability of ecosystems to resist and recover from external shocks such as droughts and fires—can be inferred from their natural variability. Here, we quantify vegetation resilience globally with complementary metrics based on two independent long-term satellite records. We first empirically confirm that the recovery rates from large perturbations can be closely approximated from internal vegetation variability across vegetation types and climate zones. On the basis of this empirical relationship, we quantify vegetation resilience continuously and globally from 1992 to 2017. Long-term vegetation resilience trends are spatially heterogeneous, with overall increasing resilience in the tropics and decreasing resilience at higher latitudes. Shorter-term trends, however, reveal a marked shift towards a global decline in vegetation resilience since the early 2000s, particularly in the equatorial rainforest belt.

全球生态系统的特征和健康与地球气候的变化密切相关。理论表明，生态系统的恢复力——生态系统抵御干旱和火灾等外部冲击并从中恢复的能力——可以从它们的自然变化中推断出来。在这里，我们使用基于两个独立的长期卫星记录的互补指标来量化全球植被恢复力。我们首先凭经验证实，大扰动的恢复率可以通过植被类型和气候带的内部植被变异性来近似。基于这种经验关系，我们从 1992 年到 2017 年在全球范围内连续量化植被恢复力。长期植被恢复力趋势在空间上是异质的，热带地区的整体弹性增加，而高纬度地区的弹性下降。然而，短期趋势显示，自 2000 年代初以来，全球植被恢复力明显下降，尤其是在赤道雨林带。