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High-latitude soils are future soil organic carbon loss hotspots, with losses dominated by particulate organic carbon (POC). The fraction of POC in total SOC (f_POC) is a key indicator, emphasizing the climate importance of preserving POC.

Fernando T. Maestre was diagnosed with anxiety during Spain’s coronavirus lockdown. A change in approach to work, life and parenting helped to restore his health.

A global study of 1602 soil samples identifies dominant bacterial plant pathogens and reveals microbial traits, soil carbon and climate that promote natural suppression, while climate change may increase disease risks in many regional hotspots.

A productive lab need not be a negative environment, says Fernando T. Maestre.

It is unclear whether the harsh abiotic conditions of drylands hinder biological invasions. This global analysis shows that drylands are vulnerable to non-native plants and are likely to become more so as native plant diversity declines and grazing pressure intensifies.

Drylands cover over 40% of Earth’s surface and will probably expand with warming climates. This study found that metallic micronutrients, essential for life, are low in dryland soils globally and are affected negatively by aridity, a threat to ecosystems and food production going forward.

The role of microbial diversity in ecosystems is less well understood than, for example, that of plant diversity. Analysing two independent data sets at a global and regional scale, Delgado-Baquerizo et al. show positive effects of soil diversity on multiple terrestrial ecosystem functions.

Undertaking an incubation study on soil collected from 110 dryland sites across the world, the authors show that the response of soil microbial respiration to temperature is consistent with that of adaptation to the ambient thermal regime.

Grazing affects plant diversity, but plant diversity in turn may modulate the effect of grazing on the plant community. This global analysis explores the association between plant species richness and plant cover resistance to grazing intensity in drylands.

How landscapes are arranged affects soil pathogenic fungi worldwide. The authors reveal the global pattern and pronounced scale-dependency of landscape complexity and land-cover quantity on soil pathogenic fungal diversity.

Plant pathogens threaten food security and ecosystem health. Projections of potential fungal plant pathogens under different warming and land-use scenarios indicate that warming temperatures under climate change will lead to increases in the relative abundance of such pathogens in most soils worldwide.

Analysis of 20 chemical and morphological plant traits at diverse sites across 6 continents shows that the transition from semi-arid to arid zones is associated with an unexpected 88% increase in trait diversity.

Vegetation patterns may be a useful indicator of environmental gradients. Here, the authors use remote-sensing and field surveys to show that patch-size distribution in drylands is related to different ecosystem multifunctionality states.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Conserving and restoring ecosystems requires understanding what natural vegetation would look like without human disturbance. This study maps the most likely global cover of trees, short vegetation, and bare ground, showing that land management through fire and herbivory may influence ecosystems more than climate change alone.

Protection afforded by inorganic minerals is assumed to make mineral-associated organic carbon less susceptible to loss under climate change than particulate organic carbon. However, a global study of soil organic carbon from drylands suggests that this is not the case.

Global maps of dryland livestock and wild herbivore dung mass show that dung can be used as a proxy for herbivory to improve herbivore density modelling and guide dryland management strategies.

The authors use experimental data from 332 sites across all major global biomes to evaluate the drivers of soil microbial respiration response to warming. They demonstrate a key role of the soil microbiome, highlighting the need to account for this in assessments of soil respiration under change.

Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes from different climates share unified responses to extreme climatic events.

A global field survey of 383 sites with different vegetation types spanning an environmental gradient reveals that soil biodiversity and functions exhibit pervasive nonlinear behaviours worldwide and are mainly governed by water availability.

How arable farming affects soil fungal biogeography is poorly understood. Here, the authors find that prevalent fungal groups become more abundant, whereas rare groups become fewer or absent in arable lands across Europe, suggesting a biotic homogenization due to arable farming.

In global drylands, soils tend to be more fertile beneath tree, shrub and grass islands. Soil fertility was greater beneath taller and wider plants but was unaffected by either grazing pressure or the type of herbivore.

Soil carbon storage is vulnerable to various climatic and anthropogenic global change stressors (for example drought, warming, land-use intensification). Here the authors show that multiple stress factors act simultaneously to reduce soil carbon storage and persistence across global biomes.

Analysis of HbA1c and FPG levels across 117 population-based studies demonstrates regional variation in prevalence of previously undiagnosed screen-detected diabetes using one or both measures and suggests that use of elevated FPG alone could underestimate diabetes prevalence in low- and middle-income countries.

Understanding the synergistic effects of aridity and grazing on dryland ecosystem attributes can be important for identifying ‘safe operating spaces’ for grazing under an increasingly arid climate. This study uses two-dimensional ecological threshold models to assess this in China’s drylands.

By analysing the abundance distributions of two key plant functional traits in global dryland communities, the authors identify a scaling relationship that quantifies how much trait diversity is required to maximize local ecosystem multifunctionality.

Combining field data and greenhouse experiments, the authors show how agricultural management practices like fungicide applications can affect the degree to which arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the soil provision phosphorus to plants.

Soil organism biodiversity contributes to ecosystem function, but biodiversity and function have not been equivalently studied across the globe. Here the authors identify locations, environment types, and taxonomic groups for which there is currently a lack of biodiversity and ecosystem function data in the existing literature.

Soil fungi play essential roles in ecosystems worldwide. Here, the authors sequence and analyze 235 soil samples collected from across the globe, and identify dominant fungal taxa and their associated environmental attributes.

System-level analysis on the effects of soil biodiversity on cropping system is lacking. Across conventionally managed European fields, the proportion of time with crop cover during the past ten-year rotation has a greater impact than crop diversity on soil microbial diversity, soil multifunctionality and crop yield.

A machine-learning approach accounting for methodological differences in studies and complex interactions among taxa allows independent soil studies to be combined at the taxonomy-based level to assess bacterial community structure.

Eduardo Moreno-Jiménez et al. experimentally manipulate rainfall and temperature in a Mediterranean dryland to explore the association of biocrusts with essential metallic nutrients. They find that biocrusts—communities of lichens, bryophytes and cyanobacteria on the soil surface—can buffer against the effects of warming and reduced rainfall on metallic nutrient availability.

Increased crop diversity in rotations reduces nitrogen losses relative to crop yield, making it an effective practice for sustainable farming, based on an analysis of 106 cereal fields across Europe and 56 climatic, soil, microbial, and management variables.

Soil age is thought to be an important driver of ecosystem development. Here, the authors perform a global survey of soil chronosequences and meta-analysis to show that, contrary to expectations, soil age is a relatively minor ecosystem driver at the biome scale once other drivers such as parent material, climate, and vegetation type are accounted for.

Combining field data from 83 sites on five continents, together with microcosm experiments, the authors show that nutrient cycling, decomposition, plant production and other ecosystem functions are positively associated with a higher diversity of a wide range of soil organisms.

Analysing data from more than 1,000 sites globally, the authors show that palaeoclimatic legacies explain a greater amount of variation in bacterial community richness and composition than current climate.

The Rio Conventions’ objectives can be met by transforming food systems to bend the curve of land degradation.

Combining very high-resolution imagery of dryland forests worldwide with climate and aquifer data from the mid-Holocene period, this paper illustrates how geological forces of the past shaped today’s forests.

Food systems are driven by incentives that often lead to food being discarded before entering the market and to the degradation of natural resources. Vegetable production in the water-scarce province of Almería, Spain, illustrates this and highlights the need for policies ensuring ethical and environmental sustainability standards.

The current definition of desertification excludes hyper-arid zones given their lack of economic activity. However, the 101 million people living there, ongoing land degradation associated with the use of groundwater for intensive agriculture and climate-change-induced aridity call for a revision of this definition.

Characterization of air and soil microbial communities above and within an Antarctic valley revealed that airborne inputs to the system cannot fully explain local soil diversity and that fungi were sourced from a larger regional pool compared to bacteria, indicating limited microbial dispersal in this region.

Soil samples collected from 224 dryland sites around the world show that aridity affects the concentration of organic carbon and total nitrogen differently from the concentration of inorganic phosphorus, suggesting that any predicted increase in aridity with climate change could uncouple the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in drylands and negatively affect the services provided by these ecosystems.

Dryland vegetation resistance to aridity is influenced by local environmental conditions, including plant richness, soil moisture dynamics and texture, and drought history, according to field observations and satellite remote sensing data across five continents from 2000 to 2022.