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Interannual variability of vegetation activity (i.e., photosynthesis) is strongly correlated with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Globally, a reduction in carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems has been observed during the ENSO warm phase (El Niño) and the opposite during the cold phase (La Niña). However, this global perspective obscures the heterogeneous impacts of ENSO at regional scales. Particularly, ENSO has contrasting impacts on climate in northern South America (NSA) depending on the ENSO phase and geographical location, which in turn affect the activity of vegetation. Furthermore, changes of vegetation activity during multiple ENSO events are not well understood yet. In this study, we investigated the spatial and temporal differences in vegetation activity associated with ENSO variability and its three phases (El Niño, La Niña, Neutral) to identify hotspots of ENSO impacts in NSA, a region dominated by rainforest and savannas. To achieve this, we investigated time series of vegetation variables from 2001 to 2014 at moderate spatial resolution (0.0083°). Data were aggregated through dimensionality reduction analysis (i.e., Global Principal Component Analysis). The leading principal component served as a proxy of vegetation activity (VAC). We calculated the cross‐correlation between VAC and the multivariate ENSO index separately for each ENSO phase. Our results show that El Niño phase has a stronger impact on vegetation activity both in intensity and duration than La Niña phase. Moreover, seasonally dry ecoregions were more susceptible to El Niño impacts on vegetation activity. Understanding these differences is key for regional adaptation and differentiated management of ecosystems. Plain Language Summary: Precipitation and temperature are important climatic drivers of vegetation processes. In particular, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events are related to changes in precipitation and temperature over large regions, which in turn affects the activity of the vegetation. In northern South America (NSA), these changes on climate are opposite during the same ENSO event depending on the geographical location. Moreover, local conditions and vegetation type can moderate or amplified changes in vegetation activity. Currently, the contrasting vegetation changes during the ENSO warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) phase are not well understood in NSA. Furthermore, it is unknown where the largest vegetation variability is occurring during ENSO phases. We combined different vegetation variables related to vegetation greenness and plant productivity over 14 years to estimate changes in vegetation activity related to photosynthesis. In this way, we assessed the variability of vegetation activity during El Niño and La Niña. We found that variability of vegetation activity is stronger and longer during El Niño than La Niña. In addition, vegetation in semi‐arid ecoregions was more susceptible to El Niño. A better understating of how vegetation activity varies during different ENSO phases will improve regional conservation strategies under the increasing ENSO frequencies. Key Points: Interannual variability of vegetation activity in northern South America is related to changes in climate due to El Niño and La Niña eventsEl Niño events have a stronger impact on vegetation activity both in intensity and duration than La Niña eventsSemi‐arid ecoregions are the most vulnerable to El Niño, but further investigation is required to understand underlying processes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical forests fix large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere every year; however, the fate of this carbon as it travels through ecosystem compartments is poorly understood. In particular, there is a large degree of uncertainty regarding the time carbon spends in an ecosystem before it is respired and returns to the atmosphere as CO2.We estimated the fate of carbon (trajectory of photosynthetically fixed carbon through a network of compartments) and its transit time (time it takes carbon to pass through the entire ecosystem, from fixation to respiration) for an old‐growth tropical forest located in the foothills of the Andes of Colombia.We show that on average, 50% of the carbon fixed at any given time is respired in <0.5 years, and 95% is respired in <69 years. The transit time distribution shows that carbon in ecosystems is respired on a range of time‐scales that span decades, but fast metabolic processes in vegetation dominate the return of carbon to the atmosphere.Synthesis. The transit time distribution integrates multiple ecosystem processes occurring at a wide range of time‐scales. It reconciles measurements of the age of respired CO2 with estimates of mean residence time in woody biomass, and provides a new approach to interpret other ecosystem level metrics such as the ratio of net primary production to gross primary production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate variables carry signatures of variability at multiple timescales. How these modes of variability are reflected in the state of the terrestrial biosphere is still not quantified or discussed at the global scale. Here, we set out to gain a global understanding of the relevance of different modes of variability in vegetation greenness and its covariability with climate. We used >30 years of remote sensing records of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to characterize biosphere variability across timescales from submonthly oscillations to decadal trends using discrete Fourier decomposition. Climate data of air temperature (Tair) and precipitation (Prec) were used to characterize atmosphere–biosphere covariability at each timescale. Our results show that short-term (intra-annual) and longer-term (interannual and longer) modes of variability make regionally highly important contributions to NDVI variability: short-term oscillations focus in the tropics where they shape 27 % of NDVI variability. Longer-term oscillations shape 9 % of NDVI variability, dominantly in semiarid shrublands. Assessing dominant timescales of vegetation–climate covariation, a natural surface classification emerges which captures patterns not represented by conventional classifications, especially in the tropics. Finally, we find that correlations between variables can differ and even invert signs across timescales. For southern Africa for example, correlation between NDVI and Tair is positive for the seasonal signal but negative for short-term and longer-term oscillations, indicating that both short- and long-term temperature anomalies can induce stress on vegetation dynamics. Such contrasting correlations between timescales exist for 15 % of vegetated areas for NDVI with Tair and 27 % with Prec, indicating global relevance of scale-specific climate sensitivities. Our analysis provides a detailed picture of vegetation–climate covariability globally, characterizing ecosystems by their intrinsic modes of temporal variability. We find that (i) correlations of NDVI with climate can differ between scales, (ii) nondominant subsignals in climate variables may dominate the biospheric response, and (iii) possible links may exist between short-term and longer-term scales. These heterogeneous ecosystem responses on different timescales may depend on climate zone and vegetation type, and they are to date not well understood and do not always correspond to transitions in dominant vegetation types. These scale dependencies can be a benchmark for vegetation model evaluation and for comparing remote sensing products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding Earth system dynamics in light of ongoing human intervention and dependency remains a major scientific challenge. The unprecedented availability of data streams describing different facets of the Earth now offers fundamentally new avenues to address this quest. However, several practical hurdles, especially the lack of data interoperability, limit the joint potential of these data streams. Today, many initiatives within and beyond the Earth system sciences are exploring new approaches to overcome these hurdles and meet the growing interdisciplinary need for data-intensive research; using data cubes is one promising avenue. Here, we introduce the concept of Earth system data cubes and how to operate on them in a formal way. The idea is that treating multiple data dimensions, such as spatial, temporal, variable, frequency, and other grids alike, allows effective application of user-defined functions to co-interpret Earth observations and/or model–data integration. An implementation of this concept combines analysis-ready data cubes with a suitable analytic interface. In three case studies, we demonstrate how the concept and its implementation facilitate the execution of complex workflows for research across multiple variables, and spatial and temporal scales: (1) summary statistics for ecosystem and climate dynamics; (2) intrinsic dimensionality analysis on multiple timescales; and (3) model–data integration. We discuss the emerging perspectives for investigating global interacting and coupled phenomena in observed or simulated data. In particular, we see many emerging perspectives of this approach for interpreting large-scale model ensembles. The latest developments in machine learning, causal inference, and model–data integration can be seamlessly implemented in the proposed framework, supporting rapid progress in data-intensive research across disciplinary boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate variables carry signatures of variability at multiple time scales. How these modes of variability are reflected in the state of the terrestrial biosphere is still not quantified, nor discussed at the global scale. Here, we set out to gain a global understanding of the relevance of different modes of variability in vegetation greenness and its co-variability with climate. We used > 30 years of remote sensing records of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to characterize biosphere variability across time scales from sub-monthly oscillations to decadal trends using discrete Fourier decomposition. Climate data of air temperature (Tair) and precipitation (Prec) were used to characterize atmosphere-biosphere co-variability at each time scale. Our results show that short-term (intra-annual) and longer-term (inter-annual and longer) modes of variability make regionally highly important contributions to NDVI variability: Short-term oscillations focus in the tropics where they shape 27 % of NDVI variability. Longer-term oscillations shape 9 % of NDVI variability, dominantly in semi-arid shrublands. Assessing dominant time scales of vegetation-climate co-variation, a natural surface classification emerges which captures patterns not represented by conventional classifications, especially in the tropics. Finally, we find that correlations between variables can differ and even invert signs across time scales. For southern Africa for example, correlation between NDVI and Tair is positive for the seasonal signal, but negative for short-term and longer-term oscillations, indicating that both short and long-term temperature anomalies can induce stress on vegetation dynamics. Such contrasting correlations between time scales exist for 15 % of vegetated area for NDVI with Tair, and 27 % with Prec, indicating global relevance of scale-specific climate sensitivities. Our analysis provides a detailed picture of vegetation-climate co-variability globally, characterizing ecosystems by their intrinsic modes of temporal variability. We find that (i) correlations of NDVI with climate can differ between scales, (ii) non-dominant sub-signals in climate variables may dominate the biospheric response, and (iii) possible links may exist between short-term and longer-term scales. These heterogeneous ecosystem responses on different time scales may depend on climate zone and vegetation type, and are to date not well understood, nor always correspond to transitions in dominant vegetation types. These scale dependencies can be a benchmark for vegetation model evaluation and for comparing remote sensing products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]