Format: ORAL

Rebeca Arias-Real1, Pilar Hurtado2,3.

1-National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain. 2-Università di Genova, Dipartimento di Farmacia, Italy. 3- Área de Biodiversidad y Conservación, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain.

Understanding global change impact on biodiversity is crucial to conserve healthy ecosystems and the essential services they provide to people. However, our understanding of the functional role of biocrusts on ephemeral streams remains unexplored. Ephemeral streams are watercourses that flow episodically during periods of intense rainfall and dry up quickly. They are widely distributed in hyper-arid, arid and semi-arid regions where the current global drying trend will be more severe, and they play a crucial role on global carbon processing and greenhouse gas emissions. Although ephemeral streams are expected to support a unique fraction of biodiversity as they are transitional habitats between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, it remains unclear which organisms may inhabit these highly dynamic habitats. Biocrusts offer a promising avenue to address this challenge given their global occurrence and their functional importance in terrestrial water-limited ecosystems such as drylands. Besides, biocrusts play key roles in global carbon and nitrogen cycles and regulate the horizontal and vertical fluxes of water (i.e., water balance). Thus, this project aims to address these challenges by exploring the functional role of biocrusts for tracking the direct effect of climate change on biodiversity but also its impact on the functioning of Mediterranean ephemeral streams.