No. 111/2020

23 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 111/2020 researchers fromNiger, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Algeria, Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia and Kenya. We make sure that they know the methods and how to use them. It is certainly time-consuming, but I personally find it very enriching. You were at the heart of this project from the very beginning and determined the methods. But a network is composed of many researchers with their own ideas. Hasn’t anyone ever banged their fists on the table and said, “my idea is better”? No, never. But other people’s ideas have ena- bled us to hit on approaches that we hadn’t come up with ourselves. This has made us able to answer questions I wouldn’t have thought of in my wildest dreams. Can I tempt you into a prediction: will the arid areas be greener 20 years from now? If we want to achieve that, we would have to immediately start on an ambitious conserva- tion and rescue programme. We work hard to publicise the results of our research; we do radio and television interviews and use social media to disseminate our findings, but the politicians haven’t yet shown much interest in our results or asked for advice. Not even in your own country, Spain, which is one of the EU countries most threatened by drought? Unfortunately, not. But if we don’t do any- thing now, in the future, southern Spain will have a landscape rather like northern Africa and we will likely exhaust the aquifers. I really wish that Spain and other affected countries would finally wake up and declare the protection of drylands and the sustaina- ble management of their water resources a national priority. Photos: Jesús Cruces, Leo Barco, María Dolores Puche PROFESSOR DR FERNANDO T. MAESTRE is a distinguished researcher at the University of Alicante, Spain, and a profes- sor of ecology at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Móstoles, Spain. After his doctorate in biology at the University of Alicante followed by a post- doc at Duke University, United States, he was awarded a Starting Grant by the Euro- pean Research Council (ERC) in 2009 for carrying out the global BIOCOM research pro- ject. Maestre has spent time working on research in coun- tries such as Australia, Ger- many, China, the UK and the United States and was granted a Humboldt Research Award in 2014. Since then, he has been cooperating closely with German colleagues in Berlin, Cologne and Leipzig to ana- lyse samples and data col- lected in arid zones. Also in 2014, the ERC awarded him a Consolidator Grant for the follow-up project BIODESERT. This gave Maestre and his in- ternational team of collabora- tors the possibility to further investigate how global dryland ecosystems are responding to climate change and deserti- fication and to propose meas- ures to mitigate their impacts. View of the Tabernas Desert in Almería, Spain, the driest area in Europe.