Trampled by livestock and scorched by ClimateChange, Earth’s biocrust is likely to become weaker in the future, researchers say, leaving the soil prey to wind.
Two years ago, 24 million tons of dust lifted high above Africa to create a plume that swirled across the Atlantic Ocean and covered Puerto Rico in a pink patina. An unusually meandering jet stream helped launch the monster dust cloud. But this week, ecologists fingered another factor in such storms: the disappearance of biocrust, a microbial mat that coats dryland soil and helps keep dust in place.
A biocrust is a hard surface coating or “skin,” typically a few millimeters thick, containing a thriving community of fungi, lichen, moss, cyanobacteria, and other microbes. Historically ecologists have paid little mind to biocrusts, which cover soils in arid, semiarid, and extremely cold places all over the world. But researchers have realized these coatings produce and process nutrients that nearby organisms need to thrive, especially in arid environments.
Biocrusts reduce dust in the air by 700 million tons per year, Weber and her team report this week in. That amount would bury all of New York City under 35 centimeters of dust. The study “places biocrusts as key players in preventing dust emissions globally,” Maestre says. Finger-Higgens and colleagues have documented the impact of climate. In a long-term biannual survey of plots in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, they found that biocrust lichens in particular suffer when temperatures increase. As Canyonlands temperatures rose by 0.27°C per decade, lichens, especially those that help convert nitrogen in the air to a form that other organisms can use, have almost disappeared, the team reported on 11 April in the.
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