Understanding the fundamental drivers that determine dryland diversity, function, and interdependence.
Research team: Efrat Sheffer (HUJI; PI), Eli Argaman (ARO), Yair Mau (HUJI), Tamir Klein (Weizmann Institute of Science), José Grünzweig (HUJI), Niv De Malach, David Zeevy (Weizmann Institute of Science), Elli Groner (Dead Sea & Arava Science Center) and Hezi Yizhaq (BGU).
Research Funding: The planning and budgeting committee
Students: PhD: Mr. Zeev Cohen
Drylands, which encompass approximately 41% of the Earth's terrestrial surface and are home to over two billion people, represent a critical ecosystem where biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are deeply intertwined. This proposal aims to develop a comprehensive mechanistic framework to understand, quantify, and model the interdependence of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in dryland environments. Building on Noy-Meir’s pulse-reserve paradigm, which describes the dynamics of water-limited systems activated by temporal pulses of resource availability, we categorize drylands into rain-driven, runoff-driven, and flood-driven ecosystems. These classifications are based on the mechanisms by which rainfall is transformed into soil moisture, the primary limiting resource in arid and semi-arid regions, also known as drylands. Our research leverages the Israeli network of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) stations to collect empirical data across a wide range of eight dryland ecosystems with varying levels of aridity and land-use changes. By integrating field measurements, remote sensing, and ecological modeling, our interdisciplinary team effort aims to elucidate how rainfall pulses translate into soil moisture pulses and reserves, and how these soil moisture dynamics influence biological diversity and, consequently, primary productivity and nutrient cycling.
