This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/ldr.3025 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Spatiotemporal drought evaluation of Hyrcanian deciduous forests and semi-steppe rangelands using MODIS time-series in Northeast Iran Omid Abdi 1* , Zeinab Shirvani 1 , Manfred F. Buchroithner 1 1 Institute for Cartography, Department of Geosciences, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany * Email. oidabdi@gmail.com or omid.abdi@mailbox.tu-dresden.de (Corresponding author) Abstract Advanced MODIS data have provided diverse products for assessing and monitoring natural vegetation affected by droughts. Between 2000 and 2016, we estimated monthly precipitation anomalies in the deciduous forests and semi-steppe rangelands of northeastern Iran using Kriging models, and analyzed 16-day vegetation anomalies using vegetation greenness and water content indices—including the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and, the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). Vegetation anomalies showed high positive responses to inter-seasonal precipitation anomalies over the 17-year period, and low positive responses to monthly precipitation deficits during critical droughts. Forest and rangeland anomalies recorded higher Moran’s coefficients based on the NDVI (I = 0.253±0.102) and NDWI (I = 0.284±0.087) with inter-seasonal precipitation anomalies, respectively. Throughout critical droughts, the NDWI anomalies showed higher coefficients with monthly precipitation deficits for both forests (I = 0.0716±0.059) and rangelands (I = 0.125±0.0615). Nevertheless, there were only significant differences between the Moran’s coefficients of the three vegetation indices for rangelands (F = 2.873; P < 0.05). BiLISA maps indicated that sparse forests show higher spatial associations with drought conditions (High-high cluster), whereas dense forests experienced lower stresses by severe droughts (High-low outlier) during drought periods. Meanwhile, some severe vegetation stresses occurred at locations with low droughts (Low-high outlier), which indicate the impact of other significant climate-induced disturbances on vegetation anomalies. Keywords: Drought, MODIS, Hyrcanian forests, semi-steppe rangelands, vegetation anomaly, vegetation index.