A key task of the project is the BIODESERT global survey, a large co-operative field survey aiming to establish a network of monitoring plots among dryland areas of the globe to evaluate how simultaneous changes in climate and grazing pressure affect both biotic attributes (of above- and belowground communities, including vascular plants, bacteria, fungi, protists and other soil fauna) and ecosystem multifunctionality (i.e. the provision of several ecosystem processes simultaneously) in global drylands. With this survey we aim to have a truly global set of field plots sampled with the same protocols encompassing most of aridity/grazing pressure conditions that can be found in global drylands nowadays.

The BIODESERT survey is coordinated by Prof. Fernando T. Maestre and the project team, who has previous experience in the setup, management and execution of large surveys such as BIODESERT; over the period 2006-2014 Prof. Maestre coordinated another large-scale survey in 236 drylands from six continents carried out during the development of the BIOCOM research project, funded by the Starting Grants program of the European Research Council.

As of July 2018, the BIODESERT consortium is formed by over 60 research groups (see the Collaborators tab for details) working in 26 different countries with dryland ecosystems (Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Ecuador, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, Mongolia, Namibia, Niger, Palestine, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Tunisia, USA and Venezuela), who have surveyed more than 300 dryland ecosystems in the field. We are currently planning and/or surveying additional sites in Portugal, Niger and Morocco, which should be completed by the end of 2018. Field data are being collected according to a standardized protocol, and all the soil and plant samples being collected are sent to the laboratories of the Rey Juan Carlos University for analyses.

Figure 1. Sites surveyed so far (black dots) or in progress (red dots) as per July 2018. At each site, three-four plots have been surveyed along a local grazing intensity gradient.

The BIODESERT global survey, the first of its kind, will provide invaluable information on how increases in aridity and grazing pressure, two major global change and desertification drivers in drylands, will affect the structure and functioning of dryland ecosystems worldwide. This survey is going beyond the state of the art in terms of its global coverage, number of field sites surveyed, plant/soil samples being collected and amount of data being generated. This unique survey and the data it is generating will allow us to test multiple questions at the edge of multiple research fronts, including community/ecosystem ecology, global change biology and desertification. These data will also be of particular interest for improving the management of grazing under climate change, something critical to attain global sustainability and key Millennium Development Goals, such as the eradication of poverty.