Área de Biodiversidad y Conservación, Departamento de Biología y Geología, ESCET, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 28933 Móstoles, Spain.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2012 Nov 19;367(1606):3062-75. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0323.
Drylands occupy large portions of the Earth, and are a key terrestrial biome from the socio-ecological point of view. In spite of their extent and importance, the impacts of global environmental change on them remain poorly understood. In this introduction, we review some of the main expected impacts of global change in drylands, quantify research efforts on the topic, and highlight how the articles included in this theme issue contribute to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Our literature analyses identify key under-studied areas that need more research (e.g. countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Somalia, and deserts such as the Thar, Kavir and Taklamakan), and indicate that most global change research carried out to date in drylands has been done on a unidisciplinary basis. The contributions included here use a wide array of organisms (from micro-organisms to humans), spatial scales (from local to global) and topics (from plant demography to poverty alleviation) to examine key issues to the socio-ecological impacts of global change in drylands. These papers highlight the complexities and difficulties associated with the prediction of such impacts. They also identify the increased use of long-term experiments and multidisciplinary approaches as priority areas for future dryland research. Major advances in our ability to predict and understand global change impacts on drylands can be achieved by explicitly considering how the responses of individuals, populations and communities will in turn affect ecosystem services. Future research should explore linkages between these responses and their effects on water and climate, as well as the provisioning of services for human development and well-being.
旱地占据了地球的很大一部分，从社会生态角度来看，是关键的陆地生物群系。尽管它们的范围和重要性很大，但全球环境变化对它们的影响仍知之甚少。在这篇引言中，我们回顾了旱地中一些主要的预期全球变化影响，量化了该主题的研究工作，并强调了本期特刊中包含的文章如何有助于填补我们目前知识上的空白。我们的文献分析确定了一些需要更多研究的关键研究不足领域（例如毛里塔尼亚、马里、布基纳法索、乍得和索马里等国家以及塔尔沙漠、卡维尔盐漠和塔克拉玛干沙漠等沙漠），并表明迄今为止在旱地进行的大多数全球变化研究都是在单一学科基础上进行的。这里收录的文章使用了广泛的生物（从微生物到人类）、空间尺度（从局部到全球）和主题（从植物种群动态到减贫）来研究旱地全球变化对社会生态影响的关键问题。这些文章强调了预测此类影响所涉及的复杂性和困难。它们还确定了增加使用长期实验和多学科方法作为未来旱地研究的优先领域。通过明确考虑个体、种群和群落的反应将如何反过来影响生态系统服务，我们在预测全球变化对旱地的影响方面可以取得重大进展。未来的研究应该探索这些反应及其对水和气候以及为人类发展和福祉提供服务的影响之间的联系。
