Soil ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) are responsible for nitrification in terrestrial ecosystems, and play important roles in ecosystem functioning by modulating the rates of N losses to ground water and the atmosphere. Vascular plants have been shown to modulate the abundance of AOA and AOB in drylands, the largest biome on Earth. Like plants, biotic and abiotic features suc...

The Namib Desert in southwest Africa is hyperarid and composed of distinct microbial communities affected by a longitudinal aridity gradient. Here, we report four soil metaviromes from the Namib Desert, assessed using deep sequencing of metavirome libraries prepared from DNA extracted from gravel plain surface soils.

This paper analyses monthly differences in drought impact on vegetation activity in a semi-arid region in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula between 1987 and 2000. The study determines spatial differences in the effects of drought on the natural vegetation and agricultural crops by means of the joint use of vegetation indexes derived from AVHRR images, a drought index (standardized precipi...

The isotopic composition of paleosol carbonates is used extensively to reconstruct past vegetation, climate, and altimetry, but poor constraints on soil evaporation temperature have limited the utility oxygen isotopes in studies. Recent advances carbonate clumped isotope thermometry (TΔ47) allow for independent controls temperature, influence remains unresolved. However, sensitivity 18O-17O-16O...

Despite our growing knowledge on plants' functional responses to grazing, there is no consensus if an optimum level of functional aggregation exists for detecting grazing effects in drylands. With a comparative approach we searched for plant functional types (PFTs) with a consistent response to grazing across two areas differing in climatic aridity, situated in South Africa's grassland and sava...

Although Earth's climate history is best known through marine records, the corresponding continental climatic conditions drive the evolution of terrestrial life. Continental conditions during the latest Miocene are of particular interest because global faunal turnover is roughly synchronous with a period of global glaciation from ∼6.2-5.5 Ma and with the Messinian Salinity Crisis from ∼6.0-5.3 ...

Dryland soils provide different societal and environmental services, such as food supply biodiversity support. In Europe, most of the dryland areas are devoted to agriculture. next decades, both European worldwide drylands expected suffer with increased intensity due climate change-derived rise in aridity. Many studies have focussed on aridity-induced changes major nutrients drylands, but littl...

Increases in leaf mass per area (LMA) are commonly observed response to environmental stresses and achieved through increases thickness and/or density. Here, we investigated how the two underlying components of LMA differ relation species native climates phylogeny, across deciduous evergreen species. Using a phylogenetic approach, quantified anatomical, compositional climatic variables from 40 ...