Two major forms of vegetation patterns have been observed in drylands: nearly periodic patterns with characteristic length scales, and amorphous, scale-free patterns with wide patch-size distributions. The emergence of scale-free patterns has been attributed to global competition over a limiting resource, but the physical and ecological origin of this phenomenon is not understood. Using a spati...

Manganiferous rock varnish (desert varnish) is common in subtropical deserts, but coatings of amorphous silica glaze dominate rock surfaces of the same lithology and exposed to similar amounts of annual precipitation in the rain shadows of the large tropical shield volcanoes such as those in Hawaii. Lacking an explanation for this contrast, a two decade-long laboratory experiment tested importa...

Drylands, which occupy more than 40% of the Earth’s land surface, are highly susceptible to degradation. It is important to understand causes, mechanisms, and environmental consequences of dryland ecosystem degradation. Land use policies are known to play a critical role in driving land cover changes, as well as in mitigating land degradation and promoting sustainable development in drylands. W...

Hyperarid, arid, semiarid, and dry subhumid areas cover approximately 41% of the global land area. The human population in drylands, currently estimated at 2.7 billion, faces limited access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food. We discuss interlinkages among water security, environmental energy economic health food security governance, how they affect drylands. Reliable adequate supply, p...

A long-standing ambition in ecosystem science has been to understand the relationship between ecosystem community composition, structure and function. Differential water use and hydraulic redistribution have been proposed as one mechanism that might allow for the coexistence of overstory woody plants and understory grasses. Here, we investigated how patterns of hydraulic redistribution influenc...

Lagged precipitation effect explains a large proportion of annual aboveground net primary productivity in some dryland ecosystems. Using satellite-derived plant and datasets the Northern Hemisphere drylands during 2000–2018, we identify 1111 pixels mainly located Tibetan Plateau, western US, Kazakhstan where productivities are significantly correlated with previous-year (hereafter, lagged type)...

1. The International context 1.1. Potential and Actual Carbon Storage Densities of the Drylands 1.2. Rationale for Sequestering Carbon in Drylands 1.3. Dryland Soils as a Carbon Sink 1.4. Creating an Economic Linkage between Dryland Restoration and Carbon Sequestration 1.5. Carbon Offsets: What are They and How do They Help? 1.6. Validation and Verification of Carbon Stores 2. Increasing Carbon...

Climate change and the widespread alteration of natural habitats are major drivers of vegetation change in drylands. In the Chihuahuan Desert, large areas of grasslands dominated by perennial grass species have transitioned over the last 150 years to shrublands dominated by woody species, accompanied by accelerated water and wind erosion. Multiple mechanisms drive the shrub-encroachment process...

Plants with crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) are increasing their abundance in drylands worldwide. The drivers and mechanisms underlying the increased dominance of CAM plants and CAM expression (i.e., nocturnal carboxylation) in facultative CAM plants, however, remain poorly understood. We investigated how nutrient and water availability affected competition between Mesembryanthemum crystalli...