A multi-metric assessment of drought vulnerability across different vegetation types using high resolution remote sensing

Abstract

Drought impact monitoring is of crucial importance in light of climate change. However, we lack an understanding of the concomitant responses of ecosystems to a variety of drought characteristics and the links between drought and ecosystem anomaly characteristics for a comprehensive set of vegetation types to provide needed information for water management. In response, this study presents a new framework that allows us to explore the relationship between drought and its impact on ecosystems in greater detail. Specifically, our framework focuses on estimating jointly the hydrological and ecosystem temporal evolution and anomalies around a drought event using four pairs of metrics: onset-onset, duration-duration, intensity-intensity, and severity-severity of drought and vegetation damage. Additionally, we incorporated a metric on vegetation vulnerability based on changes in damage severity along a gradient of increasing drought severity. Based on this framework, we evaluated drought vulnerability patterns of various vegetation types across the Netherlands and Belgium in 2018 at high spatiotemporal resolution. Our results reveal a differential vulnerability of vegetation between ecosystems with increasing drought severity, which could aid future drought impact predictions. In particular, mosaic grasslands and tree/shrub croplands are highly sensitive to increasing drought severity. Individual characteristics (onset, duration, intensity and severity) of drought and vegetation damage behave differently in various vegetation types. For instance, broadleaved forests respond faster than other forests, while mixed forests suffer less damage than other types. The early warning threshold to drought for most vegetation types is around a Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) value of −1. The characterization of a suite of drought response characteristics through our impact analysis framework can be used in a wide variety of regions to understand current and possible future responses to drought.