Integrating ecosystem resilience around thresholds in aridity: unveiling nature-based mechanisms to endure abrupt desertification

Introduction

Resilience (the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances without losing their structural or functional properties) is crucial to confront changes imposed by climate change, such as ongoing increases in aridity. This is especially relevant for drylands, which have been shown to exhibit abrupt changes in their structure and functioning once certain aridity thresholds are crossed.

Understanding Resilience

However, we have very little understanding of the drivers and patterns of resilience around aridity thresholds, which hinders our ability to monitor, preserve, and restore degraded ecosystems under climate change. Existing uncertainties arise from the complexity of studying resilience, which is a multifaceted concept and operates at contrasting levels of organization of ecosystems. Additionally, there is a lack of studies addressing the resilience of drylands around and across aridity thresholds.

Project Goals

INERTIA will combine long-term experiments, remote sensing, multiple spatiotemporal scales, and global field surveys to address all facets of resilience across contrasting levels of organization of ecosystems around and across global aridity thresholds. In particular, I aim to:

1. Evaluate the multi-faceted nature of resilience to boost remote sensing monitoring schemes.
2. Unveil drivers of global resilience across levels of organization (from climatic to physiological drivers), specifically around aridity thresholds.
3. Evaluate and improve our capacity to restore ecosystems across aridity thresholds.

Expected Outcomes

By doing so, INERTIA will provide cutting-edge advances in our understanding of resilience and its potential to monitor, evade, and recover from abrupt shifts triggered by crossing aridity thresholds. The knowledge gained by INERTIA will underpin international initiatives aimed at mitigating global change and desertification or restoring degraded drylands.

Future Research

This project may also open new research avenues on the ecology of ecosystems at the edge of thresholds, a topic of increasing relevance due to ongoing climate change.