In recent years, extreme drought and extreme wetness events have occurred with increased frequency, resulting in legacy effects of varying intensity on ecosystem services (ESs) even after the events end, which poses a serious threat to global ecological security. This paper systematically reviews the research progress on the impacts of extreme drought and wetness legacy effects on ESs, focusing on their formation mechanisms, multidimensional impacts and the role of human management. The review shows the following: (1) Research in this field is growing overall, with hotspots regarding extreme drought, provisioning services and regulating services. (2) The impacts of these legacy effects on different ESs are complex and often asymmetric. Provisioning services focus primarily on ecosystem productivity, with forests and grasslands as key research subjects. Regulating services emphasize carbon sequestration and ecosystem resilience, whereas supporting services concentrate more on biodiversity and soil nutrients. Cultural services receive the least attention. (3) Human interventions, such as nutrient management and vegetation structure optimization, can mitigate negative legacy effects. (4) This study highlights future research priorities, including bridging individual physiological responses with aggregated scale analyses to clarify genuine legacy mechanisms, evaluating the overlapping legacy effects of compound extreme events and their cross‐seasonal compensatory mechanisms and determining ecological thresholds for human interventions while expanding mitigation strategies to address the largely unexplored extreme wetness legacies. These insights can support global climate change adaptation and sustainable ecosystem management.
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Yin et al. (2026) studied this question.
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