Francisco Zambrano , Anton Vrieling, Francisco Meza, Iongel Duran-Llacer, Francisco Fernández, Alejandro Venegas-González, Nicolas Raab, Dylan Craven

Globally, droughts are becoming longer, more frequent and more severe, and their impacts are multidimensional. The impacts of droughts typically extend beyond the water balance as they accumulate over time, and can lead to regime shifts in land use. Here, we assess the effects of temporal changes in water supply and demand on vegetation productivity and land cover change over multiple time scales in continental Chile, which has experienced an extreme drought over the last 20 years. Across most of continental Chile, we found a persistent decreasing trend in water supply and an increasing trend in water demand since 1981, trends that intensify over longer time scales. This long-term decrease in water availability has led to a decrease in vegetation productivity, especially in central and southern Chile. Our models suggest that increasing drought severity has led to shifts in land use towards more drought-tolerant land cover types, such as shrublands. We also found evidence that shifts in land cover types may reveal how human perceptions of prolonged drought can indirectly lead to large-scale changes in land use. Our results suggest that long-term climate change may lead to regime shifts in land cover, which may be mitigated by context-specific adaptation strategies.