Drylands cover 41% of Earth’s land surface, are home to over a third of the world’s population, store a third of global soil organic carbon and significantly contribute to the trend and interannual variability of the net land carbon sink. At the same time, drylands are vulnerable to climate and land-use change, and projected intensifying climate extremes, and disturbances pose potential threats to future ecosystem services and 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.
This session welcomes 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. We specifically encourage submissions that (i) focus on interactions among dryland ecology, hydrology, and climatology; (ii) present the development or application of novel approaches to quantify and characterize carbon-water-ecosystem interactions across space and time; and (iii) address challenges such as temporal and spatial variability and heterogeneity, pulse-driven dynamics, and measurement and modeling needs specific to drylands.
Anne Griebel