Normalized variable importance (unitless) for the drought recovery of different vegetation types. Four kinds of vegetation types were considered and compared, including evergreen forests, deciduous forests, shrubs and grasses ( Methods ). Precip pre, total precipitation in 6 months preceding the extreme drought events; SOS drought_year, the start of growing season of drought year; MAP, mean annual precipitation; Precip CV, coefficient of variation of mean annual precipitation; Temp CV, coefficient of variation of mean annual temperature; VPD pre, mean VPD in 6 months preceding the extreme drought events; Precip lag, total precipitation during the drought response lag period; and VPD lag, mean VPD during the drought response lag period. Numbers in the legend indicate the sampling size. z-scores were calculated for Precip post, VPD post, SWE dorm, Temp dorm, NDVI pre, Precip pre, VPD pre, Precip lag and VPD lag before the RF analysis.
