This new Sala Lab publication in Global Change Biology addresses the influence of drylands on the global carbon cycle under climate change conditions. Using a data synthesis approach, Lau Gherardi and Osvaldo Sala reached robust conclusions. Although projections of climate change anticipating increases in precipitation variability and extreme events are part of the public and scientific narrative, the effects of inter-annual…
Congratulations to Laureano Gherardi on his recently published paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! Check out his paper on the effects of precipitation variability on grass- and shrub-productivity. Most studies on climate change impact focus on the effects of changes in the amount of precipitation in a system, overlooking the effects of interannual variability in precipitation. This 6-year study…
Check our paper on ecosystem services just published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Ecosystem services have been extensively studied in recent decades. Most of the thousands of scholarly papers published on the subject have focused on describing the production, spatial extent, and valuation of such services. Human reliance on ecosystem services is a function of ecosystems’ capacity to supply…
A new paper has come out from the Sala Lab in Oecologia. The paper entitled “Preference for different inorganic nitrogen forms among plant functional types and species of the Patagonian steppe” shows that shrubs and grasses absorb preferentially different forms of inorganic nitrogen. Grasses which have fibrous and shallow roots absorb inorganic N mainly as ammonium, which is the main…
A new paper from the Sala Lab published today in Ecology (see Publications)! Lara Reichmann is the lead author of this important work “Precipitation legacies in desert-grassland primary production occur through previous-year tiller density” that clearly showed the existence of legacies from previous years and documented the mechanism behind them. Legacies in aboveground net primary production were similar in absolute…