Between 1982 and 2012, the global vegetation growth generally showed the spatial-temporal evolution regularity of "wet rising and dry descending". That means the forest vegetation growth in global humid regions was generally with a rising trend ( wet rising ), and the growth of steppe in the semi-arid regions, the growth of the thorn forest and open forest vegetation in the seasonal drought regions were generally with a declining trend ( dry descending ).
The rising areas were mainly found in the rainforest regions in Africa, the coniferous forest regions in Central and East Russia, and the subtropics forest regions in Central and East China. Most of the forest regions in Europe, the forest regions in eastern and central north regions of North America, the Amazon rainforest regions in South America, and Australia's northeast regions, etc.were slowly rising as well.
The declining areas were mainly distributed in the Asian temperate grassland regions, the African dry tropical forest regions around the rainforest, the northwestern tundra and the central-west steppe of North America ( Figure 1 ).