Bending the curve of land degradation to achieve global environmental goals.

Land has a vital role in sustaining human communities, nurturing diverse ecosystems and regulating the climate of our planet. As such, current rates of land degradation pose a major environmental and socioeconomic threat, driving climate change, biodiversity loss and social crises. Preventing and reversing land degradation are key objectives of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and are also fundamental for the other two Rio Conventions: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Soil water-holding capacity does not mediate aridity effects on plant functional traits in Iberian dune ecosystems.

Background And Aims: Aridity drives plant adaptations such as reduced stature, sclerophyllous leaves, and increased phenolic production. While these patterns are well documented, the role of soil properties in modulating aridity's impact remains understudied. Trait responses may also vary-converging, diverging, or uncorrelated-across intraspecific and community levels, adding complexity to predictions of ecological responses to arid conditions.

Global alternatives of natural vegetation cover.

Preserving and restoring terrestrial ecosystems is essential to preventing the decline of life on Earth. To guide global conservation efforts, we present a detailed counterfactual map showing Earth's natural tree, short vegetation, and bare ground cover. This map accounts for environmental filtering along with realistic scenarios of fire frequency and wildlife herbivory.

Grazing Modulates the Multiscale Spatial Structure of Dryland Vegetation.

Plants can facilitate their local environment and create a two-phase spatial structure of vegetation and bare soil in drylands, which largely influences ecosystem functioning. Although an increasing number of studies have examined how global change drivers like aridity influence vegetation spatial structure in drylands (e.g.

Biocrusts alter the effects of long-term warming on soil respiration in a dryland ecosystem.

Climate warming is expected to have contrasting impacts on soil respiration in dryland ecosystems, with responses ranging from positive to negative across short-, mid-, and long-term timescales. However, the long-term (>10 yr) effects of warming and their underlying mechanisms remain understudied in biocrust-dominated dryland ecosystems. In this study, we investigated the effects of 10-13 years of experimental warming on soil respiration and its underlying regulatory mechanisms at microsites with contrasting biocrust cover in a dryland ecosystem in southeastern Spain.

A Large Fraction of Soil Microbial Taxa Is Sensitive to Experimental Warming.

Global warming is expected to significantly impact the soil fungal and bacterial microbiomes, yet the predominant ecological response of microbial taxa-whether an increase, decrease, or no change-remains unclear. It is also unknown whether microbial taxa from different evolutionary lineages exhibit common patterns and what factors drive these changes. Here, we analyzed three mid-term (> 5 years) warming experiments across contrasting dryland and temperate-boreal ecosystems, encompassing over 500 topsoil samples collected across multiple time points.

assembly and annotation of sp. strain 198, a green algal from dryland soil.

sp. strain 198 is a microalga with potential for the biotechnological production of carotenoids. In this study, we have sequenced the genome, obtaining a total contig-level genome assembly length of 149 Mbp.

Dung predicts the global distribution of herbivore grazing pressure in drylands.

Dryland grazing sustains millions of people worldwide but, when poorly managed, threatens food security. Here we combine livestock and wild herbivore dung mass data from surveys at 760 dryland sites worldwide, representing independent measurements of herbivory, to generate high-resolution maps. We show that livestock and wild herbivore grazing is globally disconnected, and identify hotspots of herbivore activity across Africa, the Eurasian grasslands, India, Australia and the United States.

Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events.

Increasing extreme climatic events threaten the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Because soil microbes govern key biogeochemical processes, understanding their response to climate extremes is crucial in predicting the consequences for ecosystem functioning. Here we subjected soils from 30 grasslands across Europe to four contrasting extreme climatic events under common controlled conditions (drought, flood, freezing and heat), and compared the response of soil microbial communities and their functioning with those of undisturbed soils.

Optimizing soil conservation through comprehensive benefit assessment in river basins.

Land degradation from water erosion poses a significant threat to water security and ecosystem stability, driving global efforts in soil conservation. Quantitative assessment of soil conservation benefits-both on-site and off-site-is crucial for guiding effective conservation strategies. However, existing methodologies often fall short in quantifying the value of these combined benefits.

Research needs on the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship in drylands.

Research carried out in drylands over the last decade has provided major insights on the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship (BEFr) and about how biodiversity interacts with other important factors, such as climate and soil properties, to determine ecosystem functioning and services. Despite this, there are important gaps in our understanding of the BEFr in drylands that should be addressed by future research. In this perspective we highlight some of these gaps, which include: 1) the need to study the BEFr in bare soils devoid of perennial vascular vegetation and biocrusts, a major feature of dryland ecosystems, 2) evaluating how intra-specific trait variability, a key but understudied facet of functional diversity, modulate the BEFr, 3) addressing the influence of biotic interactions on the BEFr, including plant-animal interactions and those between microorganisms associated to biocrusts, 4) studying how differences in species-area relationships and beta diversity are associated with ecosystem functioning, and 5) considering the role of temporal variability and human activities, both present and past, particularly those linked to land use (e.

Aboveground and belowground biodiversity have complementary effects on ecosystem functions across global grasslands.

Grasslands are integral to maintaining biodiversity and key ecosystem services and are under threat from climate change. Plant and soil microbial diversity, and their interactions, support the provision of multiple ecosystem functions (multifunctionality). However, it remains virtually unknown whether plant and soil microbial diversity explain a unique portion of total variation or shared contributions to supporting multifunctionality across global grasslands.

Unforeseen plant phenotypic diversity in a dry and grazed world.

Earth harbours an extraordinary plant phenotypic diversity that is at risk from ongoing global changes. However, it remains unknown how increasing aridity and livestock grazing pressure-two major drivers of global change-shape the trait covariation that underlies plant phenotypic diversity. Here we assessed how covariation among 20 chemical and morphological traits responds to aridity and grazing pressure within global drylands.

The impact of fungi on soil protist communities in European cereal croplands.

Protists, a crucial part of the soil food web, are increasingly acknowledged as significant influencers of nutrient cycling and plant performance in farmlands. While topographical and climatic factors are often considered to drive microbial communities on a continental scale, higher trophic levels like heterotrophic protists also rely on their food sources. In this context, bacterivores have received more attention than fungivores.

Hotspots of biogeochemical activity linked to aridity and plant traits across global drylands.

Perennial plants create productive and biodiverse hotspots, known as fertile islands, beneath their canopies. These hotspots largely determine the structure and functioning of drylands worldwide. Despite their ubiquity, the factors controlling fertile islands under conditions of contrasting grazing by livestock, the most prevalent land use in drylands, remain virtually unknown.

Stronger compensatory thermal adaptation of soil microbial respiration with higher substrate availability.

Ongoing global warming is expected to augment soil respiration by increasing the microbial activity, driving self-reinforcing feedback to climate change. However, the compensatory thermal adaptation of soil microorganisms and substrate depletion may weaken the effects of rising temperature on soil respiration. To test this hypothesis, we collected soils along a large-scale forest transect in eastern China spanning a natural temperature gradient, and we incubated the soils at different temperatures with or without substrate addition.

Self-organization as a mechanism of resilience in dryland ecosystems.

Self-organized spatial patterns are a common feature of complex systems, ranging from microbial communities to mussel beds and drylands. While the theoretical implications of these patterns for ecosystem-level processes, such as functioning and resilience, have been extensively studied, empirical evidence remains scarce. To address this gap, we analyzed global drylands along an aridity gradient using remote sensing, field data, and modeling.