Tracing Vegetation Stress from Space: Isoprene Emissions Capture the Spatiotemporal Footprint of El Niño
Author(s)
Liu, Haoran
Prentice, I Colin
Morfopoulos, Catherine
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
El Niño events exert a profound influence on the global carbon cycle by imposing widespread heat and water stress on terrestrial ecosystems. Plant isoprene emissions respond rapidly to such stress, yet it remains unclear whether this response can track the spatiotemporal evolution of El Niño’s impacts over land. Here, we used satellite-derived global isoprene emissions for the first time to assess the west-east progression of the 2015–2016 El Niño. We observed that isoprene emissions increased by up to approximately 30% across tropical ecosystems relative to the climatological mean, with pronounced anomalies emerging during the event. The spatiotemporal evolution of these anomalies closely aligns with the El Niño progression inferred from sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the equatorial Pacific. In contrast, commonly used satellite vegetation products, including leaf area index (LAI) and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), show weaker and spatially incoherent responses. These results demonstrate that satellite-derived isoprene provides a sensitive and mechanistically grounded tracer of ecosystem stress, offering a complementary perspective for monitoring the intensity and propagation of extreme climate events across terrestrial ecosystems.
Date Acceptance
2026-08-13
Citation
npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
ISSN
2397-3722
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproductionin any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyrightholder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License URL
Identifier
10.1038/s41612-026-01518-1
Publication Status
Published online
Date Publish Online
2026-08-20