Grassland ecosystems cover one-fourth of the global land area and harbor over 30% of the global carbon stored in soils. However, grasslands are subjected to extensive and intensive land degradation, which threatens biodiversity, the well-being and food-security of millions of people, and poses challenges for climate change mitigation. The question is where grasslands have degraded and where long-term greening is taking place. Time series of satellite data can be used for trend analyses, but when testing for statistical significance, it is important to account for temporal and spatial autocorrelation. Here we present our new statistical method to analyze long-term trends in grasslands based on physically-based Cumulative Endmember Fractions (annual sums of monthly ground cover fractions). Our trend analysis incorporates two steps: first we apply an autoregressive time series to each pixel to obtain a slope estimate while accounting for temporal autocorrelation. Second, we apply a general least-square regression to the slope estimates, in which we incorporate spatial covariance structure, as well as explanatory variables. We tested our approach mapping long-term trends in grasslands in Central Asia using MODSI 2001 2019 time series, which we regressed against meteorological measurements. Our results showed long term changes of both, positive (i.e., revegetation; e.g., east part of Central Asia) and negative trajectories (i.e., desiccation; e.g., north-west part of the Central Asia). Importantly, our method is scalable and transferable to other time series of satellite data and regions, and can be implemented in any computational environment, assuring accessibility and reproducibility.

·       Plant functional traits often show strong latitudinal trends. To explain these trends, studies have often focused on environmental variables, correlations with other traits that themselves show latitudinal trends, and phylogenetic conservatism. However, few studies have systematically disentangled the relative contributions of these factors.·       Using partial coefficients of determination, R2, to analyze a dataset consisting of 9,370 plant species from East Asia, we investigated factors affecting fruit type (fleshy vs. dry fruits): environmental constrains (summarized by climate region), plant growth form, and phylogenetic conservatism.  ·       Growth form and climate region are often cited in the literature as important explanations for the higher proportion of fleshy fruited species in the tropics. Nonetheless, in our analyses they explained only 1.7% and 0.3%, respectively, of the variance in fruit type. In contrast, phylogenetic conservatism explained 79.5%. Furthermore, phylogenetic conservatism was evenly distributed along the whole phylogeny, implying that fruit type reflects both ancient and recent phylogenetic relationships.·       Our findings illustrate the value in parsing out the contributions of explanatory variables and phylogeny to the variance in species' traits. They also suggest that methods using the full phylogeny to calculate partial R2 give more power than traditional methods to explore the phylogenetic patterns of functional traits.