PIF2025 - Wetlands in drylands and global ecosystems services - (PID2024-158368NB-I00)

Saline lakes are hypersensitive to changes in their water balance and therefore show amplified responses to climatic and land-use changes in their catchment. This sensitivity does not only drive large natural inter and intra-annual variations in lake water levels, which can even cause seasonal desiccation, but also exacerbates the effects of climatic changes and land-use intensification. Their high environmental diversity is partly rooted in the wide spectrum of salinities, ranging from brackish ecosystems (salinity > 1 g/L) to saturated brines with ten times higher salt concentrations than oceans. Lakes and wetlands in drylands are vanishing everywhere and shifts in lake levels are accompanied by strong salinity changes, which have critical physiological implications and often lead to disruptions of aquatic communities and changes in global earth-system processes. However, despite the resulting, often dramatic ecological consequences, saline lakes rank low on policy agendas as they are assumed to support few ecosystem services and low levels of biodiversity. This project will explore the microbial ecology and related ecosystem services in these environments by field sampling, DNA and biogeochemical analyses, and laboratory and computational approaches using metagenomics, ecoinformatics and earth-system views.