Oasisification Yields Response‐Compensated Resilience in an Arid Endorheic Basin

Abstract Rapid oasisification is widely pursued to strengthen regional livelihoods and ecological security in arid endorheic basins, yet it proceeds under mounting water scarcity and ecological trade‐offs. Whether such greening actually enhances ecosystem resilience—and through which components—remains unclear. Here we couple Pressure–State–Response (PSR) accounting with explainable machine learning (XGBoost–TreeSHAP) to characterize how pressure, ecosystem state, response capacity, and composite resilience (ER) co‐vary across contrasting landscapes in the Tarim River Basin (2000–2020). Oasis cover expanded from 12.06% to 14.32% and basin‐wide ER rose modestly from 0.50 to 0.54. However, this gain coincided with improvement in the Response component across 86.9% of the basin, whereas Pressure increased across 75.6%—most acutely along the mainstem corridor (98.8%)—and only 65.8% of the basin showed net ecological improvement. Composite resilience thus appears response‐compensated rather than pressure‐relieved. TreeSHAP attribution revealed contrasting predictor structures: net primary productivity (NPP) was the leading contributor in oasis models (26%–43%), while evaporative‐demand and moisture‐related variables contributed more in non‐oasis models. PSR quadrant analysis further localized higher‐pressure, lower‐state conditions along the mainstem. These results indicate that rising composite resilience can mask persistent pressure in water‐limited inland river systems, and that coordinated monitoring of pressure, state, and response capacity is needed to support integrated water–land management under intensifying climatic and human forcing.