Climate and Ecosystem Interactions Shaping Land Degradation and Recovery in Water-Scarce Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Land degradation is one of today’s most pressing environmental challenges, threatening food security, biodiversity, and ecosystem services on a global scale. It is estimated that more than a quarter of the Earth’s land surface is already degraded, with particularly severe impacts in drylands, where water scarcity imposes further constraints on biological activity to the point of being considered hotspots of climate change.

Under accelerating climate change, drier and warmer conditions are expected, which, combined with a growing human population, are projected to intensify degradation processes. For example, drier and degraded environments are expected to result in lower vegetation cover which will reduce soil fertility, microbial activity, and soil infiltration and, hence, further promote ecosystem degradation due to increases in runoff, erosion, and water scarcity. The joint effect of climate and human activities promoting land degradation may induce not only changes at the landscape level but also affect ecosystem resilience and its overall functioning. However, the interactions among their multiple drivers and the climatic factors that modulate them remain poorly understood. This knowledge gap undermines the effectiveness of restoration strategies and limits our ability to halt the ongoing decline in ecosystem health, making it a critical priority for future research, especially since uncertain water conditions are also expected to modify the strong relationship between water availability and ecosystem dynamics.

The goal of this Special Issue is to bring together original research articles and review papers that may advance our understanding of the dynamic and complex interactions between climate and land degradation processes across drylands and rangelands due to their high vulnerability to desertification. In order to better address land degradation processes influenced by climate change, this Special Issue collection aims to provide new perspectives on the links among vegetation, water, and soil dynamics, and how climate modulates them in both natural and managed systems. We focus on the mechanisms by which climate influences plant–soil–water feedbacks to improve our capacity to monitor, prevent, and ameliorate degradation and to promote sustainable practices in a drier and warmer world.

This Special Issue welcomes manuscripts that link the following themes:

• Interactions among water, vegetation, soil properties, and soil microbial communities under contrasting climate conditions;
• Ecohydrological feedbacks and land changes;
• Runoff and soil erosion under changing precipitation regimes;
• Interactions between climate and land management practices;
• Ecosystem restoration and Nature based solutions (NbS) to enhance ecosystem functioning;
• Soil microbial responses to land degradation and climate change;
• Carbon sequestration and climate mitigation strategies;
• Climate change effects on nutrient cycling and soil fertility;
• Alien species and ecosystem invasibility in a changing world.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Borja Rodríguez-Lozano
Dr. Pedro Leite
Dr. Deirdre Dragovich
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• desertification
• climate change
• ecosystem restoration
• landuse/land cover change
• land management
• ecohydrology
• soil health and fertility