Abstract China has 6.6 million km2 of drylands that support approximately 580 million
people. These drylands are at risk of desertification. In this Review, the changes observed in …

Despite their extent and socio‐ecological importance, a comprehensive biogeographical
synthesis of drylands is lacking. Here we synthesize the biogeography of key organisms …

Relationships between biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions (that is, ecosystem
multifunctionality) are context-dependent. Both plant and soil microbial diversity have been …

Degradation of ecosystems can occur when certain ecological thresholds are passed below
which ecosystem responses remain within 'safe ecological limits'. Ecosystems such as …

Aridity, which is increasing worldwide because of climate change, affects the structure and
functioning of dryland ecosystems. Whether aridification leads to gradual (versus abrupt) …

Land-use intensification can increase provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and
timber production, but it also drives changes in ecosystem functioning and biodiversity loss …

Intense grazing may lead to grassland degradation on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, but it is
difficult to predict where this will occur and to quantify it. Based on a process-based …

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in ecosystem multifunctionality, a concept that
has developed in the largely separate fields of biodiversity–ecosystem function and land …

The question of what and how to measure ecological resilience has been troubling
ecologists since Holling 1973s seminal paper in which he defined resilience as the ability of …

Fairy circles (FCs) are regular vegetation patterns found in drylands of Namibia and Western
Australia. It is virtually unknown whether they are also present in other regions of the world …