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• A comprehensive assessment of the three major droughts' impacts on Amazon forests. • The 2015/16 drought is the most severe meteorological drought since 2000. • Drought in 2015/16 showed lagging impacts on photosynthesis, greenness, and leaf area. • Photosynthesis, greenness, and leaf area had similar suppression in 2010 and 2015/16. • Canopy water content exhibited more widespread and severe drought impacts in 2015/16. The Amazon forests play an integral role in the global carbon cycle and have a substantial impact on Earth's climate. However, it is increasingly susceptible to the effects of prolonged droughts, exacerbated by climate change and human activities. This vulnerability underscores the importance of understanding the forests' reaction to such environmental stressors. Despite their significance, comprehensive cross-comparisons of the climate and vegetation responses during the 2005, 2010, and 2015/2016 drought episodes are not well-established. Here we utilize a range of gridded vegetation and climate datasets—including leaf area index (LAI), solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), vegetation optical depth (VOD), self-calibrating Palmer drought severity index (scPDSI), precipitation (P), land surface temperature (LST), and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR)—to thoroughly assess the climate and vegetation response to these three drought events. Our findings reveal that the extent of drought inhibition in the Amazon forests was 74.7 % in 2015, increasing to 81.3 % in 2016, a significant escalation from 49.6 % in 2005 and 57.7 % in 2010. The effects of these three droughts on vegetation varied in both physiological and structural aspects. The Amazon forests' photosynthetic activity, greenness, and leaf area experienced comparable suppression in 2010 and 2015/2016 droughts. However, canopy water content exhibited more extensive and severe impacts during the 2015/2016 drought. Our findings indicate that varying sensitivities to water deficit and solar radiation lead to diverse spatial patterns and intensities of vegetation response, highlighting the complex dynamics of the Amazon forests under drought stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Forest age was mapped at 30 m resolution using GEDI-derived forest height maps. • Climate and topographic data accounted for 23–52% in forest age mapping. • Logistic equation was the best in mapping forest age among stand growth equations. • Random forest was applicable to map forest age without classifying tree species. Forest age is a key parameter for estimating forest growth and carbon uptake and for forest management. Remote sensing provides indirect but useful information for mapping forest age at large scales. However, existing regional and global forest age products were generated at low spatial resolutions (often 1000 m) and are not useful for most forest stands in China that are smaller than 1000 m. This study aims to map forest age at the 30 m resolution based on forest height maps mainly derived from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) and Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) data, and analyze the roles of auxiliary data including temperature, precipitation, slope, and aspect in forest age mapping. Forest age is defined as the average age of dominant tree species within a pixel. Five commonly-used stand growth equations and twelve machine learning methods were tested for their suitability for mapping forest age of different tree species. We found that the Logistic equation performed the best among the tested stand growth equations and the Random Forest (RF) was the best among the tested machine learning methods. According to RF, forest height contributed predominantly to the variance in forest age mapping, while temperature, precipitation, slope, and aspect also had an overall non-negligible and variable contribution among different tree species. By integrating the climate and topographical variables, RF was applicable for forest age mapping without classifying the tree species. These results show that forest height maps derived from space-borne lidar data such as GEDI and ICESat-2 data are highly useful for mapping forest stand age, and the methodology developed in this study highlights a perspective for generating national and global forest age products at a high spatial resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]