  The Amazon rainforest (ARF) is threatened by deforestation and climate
change, which could trigger a regime shift to a savanna-like state. Previous
work suggesting declining resilience in recent decades was based only on local
resilience indicators. Moreover, previous results are potentially biased by the
employed multi-sensor and optical satellite data and undetected anthropogenic
land-use change. Here, we show that the spatial correlation provides a more
robust resilience indicator than local estimators and employ it to measure
resilience changes in the ARF, based on single-sensor Vegetation Optical Depth
data under conservative exclusion of human activity. Our results show an
overall loss of resilience until around 2019, which is especially pronounced in
the southwestern and northern Amazon for the time period from 2002 to 2011. The
demonstrated reliability of spatial correlation in coupled systems suggests
that in particular the southwest of the ARF has experienced pronounced
resilience loss over the last two decades.
