Drylands cover 40% of the global terrestrial surface and provide important ecosystem services. While drylands as a whole are expected to increase in extent and aridity in coming decades, temperature and precipitation forecasts vary by latitude and geographic region suggesting different trajectories for tropical, subtropical, and temperate drylands. Uncertainty in the future of tropical and subt...

Drylands throughout the world have always undergone periods of degradation due to naturally-occurring fluctuations in climate. However, over the past century, the human population in drylands has grown exponentially and the resulting pressures on the landscape have exacerbated various desertification processes, particularly in Africa. The degradation of drylands has led to changes in local, reg...

South Africa's land policies have increased women's participation in agriculture, but limited information exists about their agricultural activities. We surveyed 911 women working on the Makhatini Flats in Northern KwaZulu-Natal in 2006, gathering data on demographics, agricultural activities, crop production and pesticide use in both irrigated and Dryland areas. Average age of participants was...

We briefly review how microbial biotechnology can contribute to improve activities aiming to restore degraded drylands and to combat their desertification, which are an integral part of the Sustainable Development Goal 15 of the 2030 Agenda. Microbial biotechnology offers notable promise to improve restoration actions based on the use of biocrust-forming engineered cyanobacteria, which play key...

There is no single agreed definition of the term drylands. Two of the most widely accepted definitions are those of FAO and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD, 2000). FAO has defined drylands as those areas with a length of growing period (LGP) of 1–179 days (FAO, 2000a); this includes regions classified climatically as arid (Plate 1), semi-arid and dry subhumid. The...

Drylands occupy large portions of the Earth, and are a key terrestrial biome from the socio-ecological point of view. In spite of their extent and importance, the impacts of global environmental change on them remain poorly understood. In this introduction, we review some of the main expected impacts of global change in drylands, quantify research efforts on the topic, and highlight how the art...

Water drives the functioning of Earth's arid and semiarid lands. Drylands can obtain water from sources other than precipitation, yet little is known about how non-rainfall water inputs influence dryland communities and their activity. In particular, water vapor adsorption--movement of atmospheric water vapor into soil when soil air is drier than the overlying air--likely occurs often in drylan...

Precipitation pulses are essential for the regeneration of drylands and have been shown to be related to oceanographic anomalies. However, whereas some studies report increased precipitation in drylands in northern Mexico during El Niño years, others report increased drought in the southern drylands. To elucidate the effect of oceanographic/atmospheric anomalies on moisture pulses along the who...

Habitat and species richness in drylands are affected by the dynamics of a few key species, termed "ecosystem engineers." These species modulate the landscape and redistribute the water resources so as to allow the introduction of other species. A mathematical model is developed for a pair of ecosystem engineers commonly found in drylands: plants forming vegetation patterns and cyanobacteria fo...