No. 111/2020

21 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 111/2020 0 1 8 KOSMOS  Mr Maestre, when we talk about climate protection, many people immedi- ately think of the rainforests and reforesta- tion projects. But you explore what arid zones can do for climate protection. MAESTRE  That’s true. Traditionally, not much attention has been paid to dryland zones, although they account for more than 40 percent of the earth’s surface. But they don’t produce much biomass compared to other biomes, as there simply isn’t enough water to sustain a continuous vegetation cover. Added to which, scientific heavyweights like Germany and the United Kingdom don’t have any dryland regions of their own. The United States do have drylands but most studies on climate protection carried out there have been done in ecosystems with more vegetation. How did you manage nonetheless to estab- lish a research network that is now active on five continents and funded by the European Research Council (ERC)? I had the idea of studying drylands on the global scale when I was still a young PhD stu- dent. When I returned to Spain after a post- doc stint in the United States in 2005, the amount of funding I had at the time was so tiny that I could only pursue this idea in Spain. But I already knew that I wanted to make it much bigger. What happened? The breakthrough came a year later when my team and I got funding from the Ibero-Amer- ican Program of Science and Technology for Development, an alliance of Spain, Portugal THE BIOCOM PROJECT The black dots on the world map at the top indicate the location and number of experimental sites in the EU-financed BIOCOM project. Headed by Fernando Tomas Maestre and involving col- leagues working in 19 coun- tries on five continents, the project is the first to explore the composition of plant and microbial communities and the functioning of ecosystems in the world’s arid zones in a systematic way. In drylands such as the Pampa, near the Lanín volcano in Argentina (photo left), mean annual evaporation exceeds mean annual precipitation. Arid zones account for 41 percent of the Earth’s surface and are home to more than a third of the world’s population. They are of great climate relevance because their soils and ve- getation can store crucial amounts of carbon dioxide. One of the findings of the BIOCOM project was that bio- diversity in arid zones is a decisive driver of their capac- ity to provide ecosystem ser- vices essential for human life as well as for tackling global warming. and Latin American countries. This meant we could build up a network that brought together a diverse assemblage of experienced and emerging research groups. So suddenly we had partners in Argentina, Chile, Vene- zuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico. What was cooperation like in such a diverse group? I asked all the research teams to do everything exactly as we had already done it in Spain. Our approach in Spain had proved its worth, now we had to test if it could function in a dif- ferent environment. And it did! So well that it convinced the ERC? My first application in 2007 was rejected. A year later, I applied again and this time it worked. Suddenly my lab and I had enough funding to recruit the necessary staff, analyse the vast quantities of soil samples obtained and pay for the shipping. We were now able to recruit additional partners from all over the world to join our network. During my stay in Germany as a Humboldt Research Award Winner, multiple German colleagues joined the crew, either by conducting fieldwork them- selves in countries like Ghana or Burkina Faso or by analysing soil samples for variables not measured in my lab. What were the results of this collaboration? We managed to prove that plant and micro- bial diversity plays a key role in maintaining the capacity of drylands to provide essential ecosystem services linked to soil fertility › 0 2,000 km Photo: Pablo García-Palacios, Map: Emilio Guirado biocom.maestrelab.com ARIDITY INDEX 11 9 6 1 3 3 2 2 6 10 9 20 6 3 12 15 9 6 Number of completed field studies X