The Brazilian Amazon has been a focus of land development with large swaths of forests converted to agriculture. Forest degradation by selective logging and fires has accompanied the advance of the frontier and has resulted in significant impacts on Amazonian ecosystems. Changes in forest structure resulting from forest disturbances have large impacts on the surface energy balance, including on land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET). The objective of this study is to assess the effects of forest disturbances on water fluxes and canopy structural properties in a transitional forest site located in Mato Grosso State, Southern Amazon. We used ET and LST products from MODIS and Landsat 8 as well as GEDI-derived forest structure data to address our research questions. We found that disturbances induced seasonal water stress, more pronounced and earlier in croplands and pastures than in forests, and more pronounced in second-growth and recently burned areas than in logged and intact forests. Moreover, we found that ET and LST were negatively related, with a more consistent relationship across disturbance classes in the dry season than the wet season, and that forest and cropland and pasture classes showed contrasting relationships in the dry season. Finally, we found that canopy structural properties exhibited moderate relationships with ET and LST in the most disturbed forests, but negligible correlations in the least disturbed forests. Our findings help to elucidate degraded forests functioning under a changing climate and to improve estimates of water and energy fluxes in the Amazon degraded forests.

A large portion of Central-Western Asia is made up of contiguous closed basins, collectively termed as the Asian Endorheic Basins (AEB). As these retention basins are only being replenished by the intermittent precipitation, increasing droughts in the region and a growing demand for water have been presumed to jointly contributed to the land degradation. To understand the impact of climate change and human activities on dryland vegetation over the AEB, we conducted trend and partial correlation analysis of vegetation and hydroclimatic change from 2001 to 2021 using multi-satellite observations, including vegetation greenness, total water storage anomalies (TWSA) and meteorological data. Here we show that much of the AEB (65.53%) exhibited a greening trend over the past two decades. Partial correlation analyses indicated that climatic factors had varying effects on vegetation productivity as a function of vegetation types and aridity. In arid AEB, precipitation dominated the vegetation productivity trend. Such a rainfall dominance gave way to TWSA dominance in the hyper-arid AEB. We further showed that the decoupling of rainfall and hyper-arid vegetation greening was largely due to a significant expansion (17.3%) in irrigated cropland across the hyper-arid AEB. Given the extremely harsh environment in the hyper-arid AEB, our results therefore raised the concerns on the ecological and societal sustainability in this region, where a mild increase in precipitation might not be able to catch up the rising evaporative demand and water consumption resulted from global warming and irrigation intensification.