Arctic vegetation greening with impervious surface expansion from 1990 to 2018

Amid rapid Arctic climate change, vegetation greenness serves as a traceable indicator of terrestrial ecosystem change. However, Arctic greening is still widely framed as climate-driven, and spatially explicit long-term evidence quantifying how human activities modulate these trajectories remains scarce. Urban areas, as hotspots of intense human activity, offer a natural laboratory for disentangling background climate-driven forcing from local anthropogenic influences on vegetation dynamics. Here, we used Landsat observations from 1990 to 2018 to produce an annual dataset of man-made impervious surfaces for the Yamal‒Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO). The result reveals a 67% expansion, indicating rapid Arctic urbanization. NDVI max trends showed widespread greening, with greening pixels outnumbering browning ones by about 15-fold. Urban vegetation exhibited 17% higher greenness trends than rural regions (0.005 per decade). Using a conceptual model to decompose greenness trends, we found that large-scale environmental changes, representing background climate-driven forcing, were the dominant drivers (>50%) of Arctic urban greening across all urban areas. Indirect urbanization effects also substantially enhanced greenness trends. In contrast, direct impacts remained minimal (<5%), indicating an asymmetric influence of urbanization. Additionally, these drivers varied across biomes and among stages of urban development. In tundra biomes, vegetation exhibited greater ecological resilience than in taiga–boreal forest biomes. In urban areas established before 1990, more than 90% of the greenness trend was explained by large-scale environmental change and indirect urban effects. During 1990–2000, indirect effects remained positive, whereas direct urbanization impacts became increasingly negative, reaching –16%. After 2000, urbanization effects became suppressive, with indirect effects turning negative in taiga–boreal forest biomes. These findings highlight the complex synergies between Arctic urbanization and large-scale environmental changes in shaping vegetation greenness, offering critical insights for sustainable urban planning and ecosystem management in rapidly climate-changing high-latitude regions.