Drylands make up roughly 40% of the Earth's land surface, and billions of people depend on
services provided by these critically important ecosystems. Despite their relatively sparse …

Altered precipitation patterns resulting from climate change will have particularly significant
consequences in water‐limited ecosystems, such as arid to semi‐arid ecosystems, where …

The role of time in ecology has a long history of investigation, but ecologists have largely
restricted their attention to the influence of concurrent abiotic conditions on rates and …

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) cover about 12% of the Earth's land masses, thereby
providing ecosystem services and affecting biogeochemical fluxes on a global scale. They …

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts)—communities of mosses, lichens, cyanobacteria, and
heterotrophs living at the soil surface—are fundamental components of drylands worldwide …

Rewetting dry soils is associated with a burst of microbial activity and mineralization, which
manifests itself as a pulse in soil CO 2 emissions, long-known as the Birch effect. In arid and …

The rewetting of dry soils and the thawing of frozen soils are short-term, transitional
phenomena in terms of hydrology and the thermodynamics of soil systems. The impact of …

Many inland waters exhibit complete or partial desiccation, or have vanished due to global
change, exposing sediments to the atmosphere. Yet, data on carbon dioxide (CO2) …

Precipitation regimes are predicted to become more variable with more extreme rainfall
events punctuated by longer intervening dry periods. Water‐limited ecosystems are likely to …

Abstract Knowledge about global patterns of the decomposition kinetics of distinct soil
organic matter (SOM) pools is crucial to robust estimates of land-atmosphere carbon fluxes …