Natural forests in China demonstrate higher resilience compared to planted forests

Drought stress is increasingly constraining forest recovery under climate change. However, national-scale differences in drought resilience between natural and planted forests remain unclear. Here, we combined event-based drought characterization with lag-1 temporal autocorrelation (TAC) analysis of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) and net ecosystem exchange (NEE). We assessed forest recovery dynamics across China from 2000 to 2022. Results show a widespread slowdown in forest recovery. Positive TAC trend slopes occurred in 60.94% of SIF pixels and 61.05% of NEE pixels. Drought intensity and duration were more consistently associated with increasing TAC than drought frequency. This indicates that forest recovery was constrained mainly by the severity and persistence of water deficit. Clear forest-type differences were observed. Planted forests had higher proportions of positive TAC slopes than natural forests for both SIF (69.35% vs. 56.17%) and NEE (65.33% vs. 58.19%). They also responded more strongly to drought-event gradients. Planted forests responded more strongly to drought-event gradients than natural forests. For SIF-derived TAC trend slopes, the responses to drought intensity and duration were 1.87- and 3.23-fold stronger in planted forests, respectively. For NEE-derived TAC trend slopes, the response to drought intensity was 1.24-fold stronger in planted forests, whereas the difference in response to drought duration was relatively small.These findings indicate that planted forests are more sensitive to drought-related recovery slowdown, especially in photosynthetic activity. Our study highlights the need to integrate drought-event characteristics and forest type into resilience assessments and to improve planted forest management under future climate extremes.