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. 2020 Oct 5;11:4978. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-18728-7

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — a A stability landscape of forest cover against rainfall levels. At high rainfall levels, high forest cover is uni-stable (I; green), called ‘stable forest’ throughout this paper. At intermediate rainfall levels, high forest cover (II) and low forest cover (III; nonforest) are bistable states (yellow). At low rainfall levels, only the nonforested state can exist (IV; red). b The regional forest–rainfall feedback amplifies hysteresis: minimal forest extent includes only stable forests (green), thereby lacking the rainfall enhancement by bistable forests; maximal forest extent includes forests that are bistable (yellow), which then contribute to downwind rainfall levels and may stabilize forests on those locations.