Wetting or greening? Probing the global trends in Vegetation Condition Index (VCI)

Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), as a widely used drought index for monitoring vegetation drought stress and estimating drought trends, is constructed by normalizing the long-term satellite-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data. However, under global greening, vegetation across different regions has shown an increasing trend in greenness, which may cause VCI to inherit the greening trend in NDVI and further hamper its ability in drought trend analysis. Therefore, this study quantitatively explored the underlying relationship among VCI, global greening, and drought from 2001 to 2021 to examine the utility of VCI in a changing environment. Multi-source indicators were employed as surrogates for vegetation greenness and drought, respectively. Particularly, the Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Net Primary Production (NPP) were used as proxies for vegetation greenness while the Root-Zone Soil Moisture (RZSM), Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), and Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) were used for drought indices. Based on Sen’s slope estimator, Mann-Kendall (MK) test, and partial correlation analysis, our results show that the proportion of pixels with an increasing trend in VCI is approximately 38.5%, which is similar to the greenness-related indices (i.e., NPP [26.47%] and LAI [59.14%]), and is significantly higher than the other drought indices (i.e., RZSM [19.83%], PDSI [10.38%], and SPEI [9.32%]). Furthermore, our results demonstrate that the VCI, as a drought index, exhibits a closer correlation with greenness-related indicators (LAI and NPP) than other drought indices (RZSM, PDSI, and SPEI). These results reveal the potential limitations in the practical applications of VCI and could enhance our understanding of vegetation dynamics and drought trends, especially in the current greening globe. Additionally, this study serves as a cautionary note for the scientific community involved in drought monitoring, emphasizing that the VCI may not be a suitable tool for evaluating long-term trends in drought impacts on vegetation.