Why are drylands now a priority?

As they explain to Chris Smith, Sasha Reed, from the US Geological Survey, and Andrew Feldman, from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, are working on an exciting new initiative that aims to build momentum around a formerly neglected but crucial sector of science and the environment…

Sasha - This initiative is all about bringing drylands deserts and other dry ecosystems to the forefront of science. We really want to blend how we understand systems with satellites and models and on the ground measurements, aeroplanes all together to try to understand complex dryland ecosystems.

Chris - But why don't we understand them already, Andrew?

Andrew - They're very heterogeneous. If you go to a desert and you look out and about and you move one metre to the right, one metre to the left, things can change quite rapidly. Different plants, different types of animals, different amounts of moisture that's available. And they're very vulnerable to climate. They're very vulnerable to weather, large and very intense heat waves and droughts and even floods. So they're quite vulnerable to these extreme climate events.

Chris - But why, Sasha, have we suddenly decided this is a priority now?

Sasha - Drylands historically haven't received the same attention for us because if we close our eyes and I say 'picture a desert,' most of us will picture blowing sand dunes. Maybe there's a camel in the background, but we don't see a lot of life. But drylands actually have lots of life. And so because we've perceived them as desert wastelands, we haven't studied them in the same way we studied wetter ecosystems. We've assumed they're not important, but we're realising drylands are incredibly important to our species and other species. They provide 60% of our food. They represent huge portions of the carbon cycle, which regulates our climate. Drylands are crazy important and we're just starting to get into that a lot more. And so now is the time to be able to bring a lot of these new tools we have for studying, as Andrew said, heterogeneous variable ecosystems in ways that we just couldn't before. So it's kind of the joining of an volution of our realising how important they are with the evolution of the tools that we need to understand these really complicated ecosystems.

Chris - Who are the big players in this then?

Sasha - NASA is a huge player in this. So NASA really has the ability and NASA's terrestrial ecology program has the ability to bring together the diverse skills and tools and expertise needed to do this dramatic advance of understanding and predicting and making decisions for drylands. So NASA is the lead of this and has charged Andrew and I and the rest of our crack team of scientists and dryland decision makers to try to put together a plan for how we would use all of these different tools to better understand drylands.

Chris - How's it going to work then, Andrew? Are you basically going to commission studies or fund studies or guide where funding should go, where the exploration needs to turn its attention in order to solve a lot of these unknowns that we've hitherto overlooked?

Andrew - The first step for us right now is we're in the planning phase. So we've written a big document that gives the agenda for what the science community, what the practitioner communities and land managers should focus on. And then if it's selected to go forward, there's several ways in which funding can be distributed. But a lot of it is gonna be competed through proposals. So scientists and land managers could write proposals to this NASA programme to get pretty large amounts of money to do three, four year studies. And then there's also directed parts of the missions. NASA programme managers might direct aircraft or field collection campaigns that, you know, might be varying in the amount of money they give over, I'd say, 7 to 10 years.

Chris - You've said the M word. So how much actually funding is being put up? I mean, is this a realistic amount of money? Because if it's the problem you're saying it is, which is just many, many decades of underinvestment under investigation, many unknowns, this is going to take a lot of resource.

Andrew - We haven't been given a budget, which has actually made this very challenging to plan for. So we've had to kind of think of different levels of involvement of the community, smaller scale up to larger scale. But we know from the last mission that was an arctic boreal campaign that NASA ran since 2010 or so, up to now, that was about a hundred million dollars we've found and maybe a little bit more than that. So we're anticipating maybe a similar level.

Chris - That's not very much though, is it Sasha? Because if you look at what Congress gave long Covid about a year ago, that was measured in the billions, and you are talking about just a hundred million dollars. I mean, that's actually small beer.

Sasha - I definitely think billions would be a great budget for us to be able to work with on dryland science, but having a hundred or more million dollars is still pretty good and would allow us to engage the community. As Andrew said, it's not us who will get the money if the adaptation and response and drylands program was moved forward, it would be the research community. And as Andrew said, being able to do science for 10 years or more is part of the power too. So part of it is the funding, but part of it is the length of time. It gives a decade long view of coordinated research that really lets scientists sink their teeth into these heavy questions about how these ecosystems are working.

Chris - You talk about community and you also talk about time. Really two things spring to mind. One is that if you've got time, you can grow a community because you can invest upstream in people that aren't even at university yet, can't you? So you can have a plan for the future. But have you got enough pairs of hands who can actually really kickstart this? Is the science, if it has been under invested in previously, has it got the pairs of hands that you will need to get this going at the sort of scale that it sounds like you want to see it delivering on?

Sasha - Great question. Yes. We totally have the hands. There is so much interest in engagement in drylands right now. I feel like drylands are having a moment. And one of the things that is really cool about these terrestrial ecology field campaigns, as you say, is that people can be in them for whole big parts of their careers. And in the arctic and boreal experiment above the one that's currently ending for NASA, there are people who are principal investigators now who started as grad students, then they were postdoctoral fellows, then they were early career scientists, and moving through the, the pipeline all under that umbrella of the field campaign. And so we think there are so many useful hands right now, and it's part of why now feels like a fantastic time to have a drylands focused campaign.

Chris - Andrew, America's about to get a new president and NASA is going to get a new boss, isn't it? So is that going to affect any of this?

Andrew - We don't know. I think there's an interaction between what the president's priorities are, what the next lead of NASA, and then what Congress does. These things have to go through Congress and it's very unclear to us how Congress will handle this. I will say this campaign's actually set up in a pretty bipartisan manner. In that big chunk of our campaign is in Western US. It's kind of written by the people, for the people we've included ranchers, farmers, tribal communities, research communities. In the scoping that we've done, we're focusing on ranching, farming, not only just discovering how science works and how things work in dry lands, how plants respond to the environment, but also how can we better do cattle ranching and what are the best plants? How do plants respond to the environment that cattle eat and how, how do they survive? This kind of comes down to the fundamental things we're gonna work on here.