ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2012
Warming reduces the growth and diversity of biological soil crusts in a semi-arid environment: implications for ecosystem structure and functioning.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lichens in times of climate change - impacts and responses especially in boreal and polar ecosystems.MycoKeys · 2026Review
- eBryoSoil: a citizen science application to monitor changes in soil ecosystems.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Biocrusts intensify water redistribution and improve water availability to dryland vegetation: insights from a spatially-explicit ecohydrological model.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Continuous monitoring of chlorophyllPlant and soil · 2023Article
- Ecology and responses to climate change of biocrust-forming mosses in drylands.Journal of experimental botany · 2022Review
- Decline in biological soil crust N-fixing lichens linked to increasing summertime temperatures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Responses of Biocrust and Associated Soil Bacteria to Novel Climates Are Not Tightly Coupled.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- UAV RGB, thermal infrared and multispectral imagery used to investigate the control of terrain on the spatial distribution of dryland biocrust.Earth surface processes and landforms · 2021Article
- Strong in combination: Polyphasic approach enhances arguments for cold-assigned cyanobacterial endemism.MicrobiologyOpen · 2019Article
- Simulated climate change affects how biocrusts modulate water gains and desiccation dynamics after rainfall events.Ecohydrology : ecosystems, land and water process interactions, ecohydrogeomorphology · 2018Article
- Nitrogen deposition reduces the cover of biocrust-forming lichens and soil pigment content in a semiarid Mediterranean shrubland.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2017Article
- Insight into climate change from the carbon exchange of biocrusts utilizing non-rainfall water.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Air Pollution and Climate Change Effects on Allergies in the Anthropocene: Abundance, Interaction, and Modification of Allergens and Adjuvants.Environmental science & technology · 2017Article
- Albedo feedbacks to future climate via climate change impacts on dryland biocrusts.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Structure and functioning of dryland ecosystems in a changing world.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2016Article
- Plant size and leaf area influence phenological and reproductive responses to warming in semiarid Mediterranean species.Perspectives in plant ecology, evolution and systematics · 2016Article
- Microsite Differentiation Drives the Abundance of Soil Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria along Aridity Gradients.Frontiers in microbiology · 2016Article
- Climate change and physical disturbance manipulations result in distinct biological soil crust communities.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2015Article
- Climate change and physical disturbance cause similar community shifts in biological soil crusts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Biocrusts modulate warming and rainfall exclusion effects on soil respiration in a semi-arid grassland.Soil biology & biochemistry · 2015Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Biological soil crusts (BSCs) are key biotic components of dryland ecosystems worldwide that control many functional processes, including carbon and nitrogen cycling, soil stabilization and infiltration. Regardless of their ecological importance and prevalence in drylands, very few studies have explicitly evaluated how climate change will affect the structure and composition of BSCs, and the functioning of their constituents. Using a manipulative experiment conducted over 3 years in a semi-arid site from central Spain, we evaluated how the composition, structure and performance of lichen-dominated BSCs respond to a 2.4°C increase in temperature, and to an approximately 30 per cent reduction of total annual rainfall. In areas with well-developed BSCs, warming promoted a significant decrease in the richness and diversity of the whole BSC community. This was accompanied by important compositional changes, as the cover of lichens suffered a substantial decrease with warming (from 70 to 40% on average), while that of mosses increased slightly (from 0.3 to 7% on average). The physiological performance of the BSC community, evaluated using chlorophyll fluorescence, increased with warming during the first year of the experiment, but did not respond to rainfall reduction. Our results indicate that ongoing climate change will strongly affect the diversity and composition of BSC communities, as well as their recovery after disturbances. The expected changes in richness and composition under warming could reduce or even reverse the positive effects of BSCs on important soil processes. Thus, these changes are likely to promote an overall reduction in ecosystem processes that sustain and control nutrient cycling, soil stabilization and water dynamics.
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