"As summer temperatures continue to rise, important biocrust-forming organisms in the American Southwest may be lost."
"Biological soil crusts, or biocrusts, are communities of living organisms at the soil surface and are known as the “living skin” of dryland ecosystems. They cement soil grains together, thereby protecting dryland soils from erosion. Biocrusts also add critical nutrients to the soil by converting nitrogen in the atmosphere to ammonia, which serves as a kind of fertilizer for plants and microbes.
Unfortunately, trampling by livestock and such human activity as driving vehicles off-road make biocrust survival difficult. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America has suggested that there’s another phenomenon that biocrusts are sensitive to: climate change.
According to Rebecca Finger-Higgens, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) at the Southwest Biological Science Center, the study has a long history. It originally sought to better understand how biocrust communities change over time as well as to address the dearth of studies that assessed the long-term impacts and ecology of biocrusts. “It was a really unique, long-term study started by Jayne Belnap [a USGS soil researcher] back in the nineties,” explained Finger-Higgens."
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