Drylands represent about 41% of Earth’s land area, host more than 1,500 tree species and support 20% the world’s human population. Trees are key to functioning numerous dryland ecosystems contribute goods services for many local communities, but threatened by global changes. From this perspective, mapping assemblages drylands can provide valuable information conservation. To our knowledge, warm...

Both light use efficiency (LUE) and water (WUE) play essential roles in ecosystem production. The extent to which production is affected by the coupling between LUE WUE remains unclear. In this study, we used data from flux measurements weather stations Heihe River Basin, China, along a strong climatic gradient quantify relationship WUE. Variations of explained up 85% variations contribution in...

Global precipitation isoscapes based on the Global Network for Isotopes in Precipitation (GNIP) network are an important toolset that aid our understanding of global hydrologic cycles. Although the GNIP database is instrumental in developing global isoscapes, data coverage in some regions of hydrological interest (e.g., drylands) is low or non-existent thus the accuracy and relevance of global ...

Despite their extent and socio-ecological importance, a comprehensive biogeographical synthesis of drylands is lacking. Here we synthesize the biogeography key organisms (vascular nonvascular vegetation soil microorganisms), attributes (functional traits, spatial patterns, plant–plant plant–soil interactions) processes (productivity land cover) across global drylands. These areas have long evol...

Abstract This paper synthesizes the contemporary challenges for sustainability of social-environmental system (SES) across a geographically, environmentally, and geopolitically diverse region—the Asian Drylands Belt (ADB). region includes 18 political entities, covering 10.3% global land area 30% total drylands. At present time, ADB is confronted with unique set environmental socioeconomic chan...

Green water, or plant-available soil moisture, is a substantial subset of terrestrial fresh water. Land-use change (LUC) alters green water dynamics through interactions on the micro-level (i.e., between and vegetation) macro-level land surface atmosphere). Ongoing global deforestation, growing interest in reforestation projects, begs question whether such large-scale LUCs have major eco-hydrol...

The scarcity of water characterising drylands forces vegetation to adopt appropriate survival strategies. Some of these generate water-vegetation feedback mechanisms that can lead to spatial self-organisation of vegetation, as it has been shown with models representing plants by a density of biomass, varying continuously in time and space. However, although plants are usually quite plastic they...

Abstract. Earth's drylands are home to more than two billion people, provide key ecosystem services, and exert a large influence on the trends variability in carbon cycle. However, modeling dryland water fluxes with remote sensing suffers from unique challenges not typically encountered mesic systems, particularly capturing soil moisture stress. Here, we develop evaluate an approach for joint o...