Forests are becoming less resilient because of climate change

Climate change has been linked with a widespread decline in the ability of many of the world's forests to bounce back after events such as drought and logging. Forests around the world differ in their resilience to disturbances, but relatively little is know about how that resilience is changing over time. To tease out any shifts, Giovanni Forzieri at the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues ran a machine learning algorithm on satellite data of global vegetation from 2000 to 2020 to calculate a metric of resilience. Resilience was defined by a forest's ability to avoid shifting state, such as becoming savannah, and withstand perturbations, such as an influx of insect pests. The researchers found that more than half of forests in arid, tropical and temperate regions – where the majority of the world's trees are found – showed a significant decrease in resilience over the two decades.