Global remote sensing reveals vegetation clustering as a physical footprint of shifting aridity trends in drylands

Abstract

Due to climatic changes, excessive grazing, and deforestation, semi-arid and arid ecosystems are vulnerable to desertification and land degradation. As aridity increases, vegetation cover often self-organizes into spatial patterns before collapsing to bare soil. While recent theoretical work has established that spatially heterogeneous yet isotropic environments induce a smooth hysteresis loop -- yielding either periodic (hexagonal) patterns during degradation or disordered (clustered) patterns during recovery -- empirical validation of this physical footprint at a global scale has been lacking. Here, we present an extensive empirical validation using remote sensing across eight distinct global ecosystems, coupled with historical bio-climatic databases. We demonstrate that the spatial morphology of vegetation patches acts as a direct physical footprint of the ecosystem's historical aridity trend. Our results show that ecosystems experiencing increasing aridity display periodic arrays with a defined wavelength, whereas those recovering under decreasing aridity exhibit scale-free clustering. This framework provides a non-destructive, robust satellite-based indicator for diagnosing whether a dryland ecosystem is on a degradation or recovery pathway.