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Highly protected areas buffer against aridity thresholds in global drylands

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Abstract

Drylands are highly vulnerable to global-scale aridity thresholds that cause drastic reductions in their productivity. While protected areas may help buffer against the impact of aridification, their effectiveness in mitigating the aridity thresholds across global drylands remains virtually unknown. Here we assembled a global dataset of drylands and found that highly protected areas, which include national parks and wilderness areas, can buffer the emergence of aridity thresholds in ecosystem productivity by up to 0.15 units of aridity. This suggests that, in highly protected regions, drylands must become substantially drier before reaching an aridity-induced threshold in ecosystem productivity. The importance of highly protected area for supporting drylands was consistent across 23 years of study, in woody and non-woody ecosystems and after accounting for rangelands. Notably, only 3.3% of all drylands were under The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) category I high levels of protection such as wilderness areas, with 3.8% being protected under IUCN category II (for example, national parks). Overall, our findings highlight the crucial role of highly protected areas in maintaining productive dryland ecosystem in the face of global aridity thresholds, and further stress the need for increasing the level of protection to ensure the conservation of drylands under predicted climate changes.

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Fig. 1: Global distribution of the 18,762 drylands in this study.
Fig. 2: Conservation areas buffer against aridity thresholds in ecosystem productivity (2001–2023).
Fig. 3: Highly protected drylands protect against aridity thresholds in ecosystem productivity (2001–2023).

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Data availability

All the data used in this study are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29626661 (ref. 41).

Code availability

The R code used to analyse the data is available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29626736 (ref. 42).

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Acknowledgements

M.D.-B. acknowledges support from a US Fulbright grant associated with the programme ‘Estancias de personal docente y/o investigador senior en centros extranjeros 2022’ from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Spain (grant no. PRX22/00442). M.D.-B. also acknowledges support from GRASS4FUN (Biodiversa+ 2022)/MCIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ Unión Europea. D.J.E. is supported by the Hermon Slade Foundation. Y.F. is supported by the National Key R&D Program (grant no. 2024YFD1300800).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratorio de Biodiversidad y Funcionamiento Ecosistémico, Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Sevilla, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Seville, Spain

    Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo

  2. Centre for Ecosystem Science, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of NSW, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    David J. Eldridge

  3. College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China

    Youzhi Feng

  4. Institute of Agricultural Resources and Environment, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Jianwei Zhang

  5. Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, Environmental Science and Engineering, King Abdullah, University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

    Emilio Guirado

Authors
  1. Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo
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  2. David J. Eldridge
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  3. Youzhi Feng
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  4. Jianwei Zhang
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  5. Emilio Guirado
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Contributions

M.D.-B. conceived the original idea of the analyses presented in the Article. E.G. and M.D.-B curated and prepared the database. M.D.-B, E.G., Y.F. and J.Z. performed the statistical analyses and generated the figures. M.D.-B wrote the first draft. D.J.E., E.G., Y.F. and J.Z. contributed to data interpretation and paper editing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo or Emilio Guirado.

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Nature Plants thanks Christin Abel and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–23 and Tables 1–7.

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Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Eldridge, D.J., Feng, Y. et al. Highly protected areas buffer against aridity thresholds in global drylands. Nat. Plants (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-025-02099-2

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