Drylands, covering more than 40% of the Earth's land surface, are water-limited regions where evaporation exceeds precipitation. They are home to over a third of the world’s population, serve as reservoirs of carbon that regulate global trends and variability in atmospheric CO2, represent a key source to the global dust cycle, and host diverse endemic plants and animals. Drylands are vulnerable to climate and land-use change, and these pressures are expected to amplify the severity of climate extremes. At the same time, the extent of drylands is projected to expand, as climate change intensifies aridity, triggering abrupt ecosystem changes, which could affect services supporting local livelihoods. Yet, much about dryland ecosystem dynamics remains poorly understood, in part because of the importance of rapid-onset and highly localized events, emphasizing the need for improved understanding of dryland processes and their response to global change. Thus, developing integrated tools for assessing and monitoring dryland ecosystems represents a high research priority.
This session presents studies that advance our understanding of ecosystem dynamics in drylands, their role in carbon, water, and nutrient cycling, and the implications for ecosystem resilience under current and future global change. Topics of this session include (i) novel remote sensing approaches and applications for drylands, focusing on surface component mapping and monitoring, (ii) investigations on interactions among dryland ecology, hydrology, and climatology; (iii) presentation of the development or application of novel approaches to quantify and characterize dryland carbon-water-ecosystem interactions across space and time; and (iv) addressing challenges such as temporal and spatial variability and heterogeneity, pulse-driven dynamics, and measurement and modeling needs specific to drylands.
Anne Griebel