Soil microbial communities are fundamental to maintaining key soil processes associated
with litter decomposition, nutrient cycling, and plant productivity and are thus integral to …

Microbial cooperation pervades ecological scales, from single-species populations to host-
associated microbiomes. Understanding the mechanisms promoting the stability of …

Global warming, habitat loss and overexploitation of limited resources are leading to
alarming biodiversity declines. Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems that display …

Global change frequently disrupts the connections among species, as well as among
species and their environment, before the most obvious impacts can be detected. Therefore …

We briefly review how microbial biotechnology can contribute to improve activities aiming to
restore degraded drylands and to combat their desertification, which are an integral part of …

What is the potential for synthetic biology as a way of engineering, on a large scale, complex
ecosystems? Can it be used to change endangered ecological communities and rescue …

Conservation Biology fosters the study of Earth's ecosystems and biodiversity aiming at
protecting species and their habitats from menaces causing the erosion of biotic interactions …

The possibility of abrupt transitions threatens to poise ecosystems into irreversibly degraded
states. Synthetic biology has recently been proposed to prevent them from crossing tipping …

Semiarid ecosystems (including arid, semiarid and dry-subhumid ecosystems) span more
than 40% of extant habitats and contain a similar percentage of the human population …

Semiarid ecosystems are threatened by global warming due to longer dehydration times
and increasing soil degradation. Mounting evidence indicates that, given the current trends …