Resilience and Adaptation in Desert Ecosystems: Unveiling Microbial Legacies and Plant Functional Trait Coordination Under Climate Change

Desert ecosystems, which cover more than one-third of Earth's land surface, are experiencing intensifying pressures from land-use disturbances and climate change that threaten their stability and biodiversity. Yet despite their global extent and ecological importance, deserts remain among the least studied biomes, particularly with respect to the belowground processes that sustain productivity, biogeochemical cycling, and long-term ecosystem resilience. Most prior work has focused on vegetation, leaving the roles of soil microbiomes and plant functional trait coordination comparatively underexplored. This knowledge gap is significant because growing evidence shows that microbial dynamics and plant trait…

• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 42271071, 42571075