Access to groundwater leaves riparian plants in drylands resistant to atmospheric drought but vulnerable to changes in climate or water use that reduce streamflow and groundwater tables. Despite the vulnerability of riparian vegetation to water balance changes few extensible methods have been developed to automatically map riparian plants at the scale of individual stands or stream reaches, to assess their response to changes in moisture due to drought and climate change, and to contrast those responses across plant functional types. We used LiDAR and a sub-annual timeseries of NDVI to map vegetation and then assessed drought response by comparing a drought index to variation in a remotely sensed metric of plant health. First, a random forest model was built to classify vegetation communities based on phenological changes in Sentinel-2 NDVI. This model produced community classes with an overall accuracy of 97.9%; accuracy for the riparian vegetation class was 98.9%. Following this initial classification, LiDAR measurements of vegetation height were used to split the riparian class into structural subclasses. Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis was applied to a timeseries of Landsat imagery from 1984 to 2018, producing annual sub-pixel fractions of green vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, and soil. Relationships were assessed within structural subclasses between mid-summer green vegetation fraction (GV) and the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), a measure of soil moisture drought. Among riparian vegetation subclasses, all groups showed significant positive correlations between SPEI and GV, indicating an increase in healthy plant material during wetter years. However, the relationship was strongest for herbaceous plants (R^2=0.509, m=0.0278), intermediate for shrubs (R^2=0.339, m=0.0262), and weakest for the largest trees (R^2=0.1373, m=0.0145). This implies decoupling of larger riparian plants from the impacts of atmospheric drought due to subsidies provided by groundwater resources. Our method was extended successfully to multiple climatically-dissimilar dryland systems in the American Southwest, and the results provide a basis for ongoing studies on the fine-scale drought response and climatic vulnerability of riparian woodlands.