ArticleRoyal Society open science2020
Synthetic soil crusts against green-desert transitions: a spatial model.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Synthetic horizontal gene transfer for ecosystem restoration.Biology direct · 2026Article
- The role of extremophile microbiomes in terraforming Mars.Communications biology · 2025Review
- Eco-Inspired terraform networks emerge from material self-organization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Biodiversity as a firewall to engineered microbiomes for restoration and conservation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Environmental Galenics: large-scale fortification of extant microbiomes with engineered bioremediation agents.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology.iScience · 2022Article
- 15 years of microbial biotechnology: the time has come to think big-and act soon.Microbial biotechnology · 2022Article
- The soil crisis: the need to treat as a global health problem and the pivotal role of microbes in prophylaxis and therapy.Microbial biotechnology · 2021Article
- Synthetic Biology for Terraformation Lessons from Mars, Earth, and the Microbiome.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Semiarid ecosystems are threatened by global warming due to longer dehydration times and increasing soil degradation. Mounting evidence indicates that, given the current trends, drylands are likely to expand and possibly experience catastrophic shifts from vegetated to desert states. Here, we explore a recent suggestion based on the concept of ecosystem terraformation, where a synthetic organism is used to counterbalance some of the nonlinear effects causing the presence of such tipping points. Using an explicit spatial model incorporating facilitation and considering a simplification of states found in semiarid ecosystems including vegetation, fertile and desert soil, we investigate how engineered microorganisms can shape the fate of these ecosystems. Specifically, two different, but complementary, terraformation strategies are proposed:
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.