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Integrating ecosystem water demands into drought monitoring and assessment under climate change

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Research on the ecological impacts of drought has predominantly focused on the scarcity of water supply, often overlooking divergent ecosystem water demands across vegetation types, regions, and time. These diverse ecosystem water demands need to be incorporated into an effective ecological drought monitoring and assessment framework.

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Fig. 1: Status and trend of ecological drought research.
Fig. 2: The multifaceted characteristics of ecological drought.

Data availability

All data used in this Comment are available on the repository: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24921411.v1

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41988101), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (grant no. 2019QZKK0208), and Joint CAS-MPG Research Project HZXM20225001MI. A.C. acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy (DE-SC0022074).

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Correspondence to Anping Chen or Shilong Piao.

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. Nature Water thanks the anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Cui, J., Chen, A., Huntingford, C. et al. Integrating ecosystem water demands into drought monitoring and assessment under climate change. Nat Water 2, 215–218 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00217-6

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