Assessment of Carbon Productivity Trends and Their Resilience to Drought Disturbances in the Middle East Based on Multi-Decadal Space-Based Datasets

Gross primary production (GPP) is a key component in assessing the global change in carbon uptake and in evaluating the impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems. A decrease in the photosynthetic rate due to stomata closing by vegetation could have an impact on GPP. Nonetheless, the uncertainty in long-term GPP patterns and their resilience to drought disturbances has not yet been examined thoroughly. In this study, four state-of-the-art GPP datasets, including the revised EC-LUE algorithm-driven GPP (GLASS-GPP), the EC flux tower upscaling-based GPP (FluxCom-GPP), the MODIS algorithm-driven GPP model (GIMMS-GPP), and the vegetation photosynthesis model-GPP (VPM-GPP), were used to assess GPP characteristics in the Middle East region for 36 years spanning the period of 1982 to 2016. All investigated datasets revealed an increasing trend over the study period, albeit with a more pronounced upward trend for the VPM-GPP dataset in the most recent decades (2000–2016). On the other hand, FluxCom-GPP exhibited less variability than the other datasets. In addition, while GLASS-GPP presented a significant increasing trend in some parts of the region, significant negative trends dominated the other parts. This study defined six significant drought episodes that occurred in the Middle East region between 1982 and 2017. The most severe drought events were recorded in 1985, 1989–1990, 1994, 1999–2001, 2008, and 2015, spreading over more than 15% of the total area of the region. The extreme droughts accounted for a high decline in GPP in the north of Iraq, the northeast of Syria, and the southwest of Iran, where 20.2 and 40.8% of the ecosystem’s GPP were severely non-resilient to drought according to the GLASS and VPM-based GPP responses, respectively. The spatial distribution patterns of the correlations between the SEDI and GPP products were somewhat similar and coherent. The highest positive correlations were detected in the central and western parts of Turkey, the western and northeastern parts of Iran, and north Iraq, which showed anomalous r values (r = 0.7), especially for the SEDI-VPM and SEDI-FluxCom GPP associations. The findings of this study can provide a solid base for identifying at-risk regions in the Middle East in terms of climate change impacts, which will allow for better management of ecosystems and proper implementation of climate policies.