El Niño Southern Oscillation and Enhanced Arid Land Vegetation Productivity in NW South America

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a periodic disruption of coupled oceanic-atmospheric conditions in the tropical Pacific, which changes global precipitation regimes. One area strongly affected by positive (el Niño) phases is the Pacific Coast of South America. The specific effects of ENSO on Andean ecological communities have received little attention, however. We examine vegetation gross primary productivity (GPP) on Peru’s north coast arid-lands during a recent (2016–2017) el Niño, using a time series of Sentinel 2 imagery. By comparing GPP time-series in three agricultural subregions and three endemic desert vegetation communities, we demonstrate that levels of primary productivity in desert regions during ENSO-positive phases meet or exceed thresholds of adjacent agricultural lands. These results, the first that quantify and spatialize changing GPP between ENSO-neutral and ENSO-positive phases for South American arid-land biomes, both outline the scale and distribution of the el Niño effects on terrestrial ecosystems and highlight the resulting opportunities for human inhabitants. The dramatic changes to endemic vegetation on the normally hyperarid coastal desert of Peru revealed by reconstructed GPP suggest that periodic el Niño precipitation plays a critical role in arid land ecodynamics by enhancing establishment, green growth, and seedbank development. These findings improve our understanding of ENSO’s net effects and highlight the roles of abrupt climate events in the arid land ecology of NW South America.