Image

Covering almost 50% of the global land surface, drylands display remarkable sensitivity to disturbance, climate extremes, and rising atmospheric CO₂. Yet the cross-scale, predictive understanding of these ecosystems remains poor. New multi- and hyperspectral, LiDAR, and radar satellite missions provide innovative opportunities to scale measurements made in situ to landscapes, regions, and the planet, with operational and planned NASA missions offering novel data at the high-spatial resolutions needed for heterogeneous drylands (e.g., EMIT, ECOSTRESS, GEDI, SWOT, OCO-3, STV, PBL, NISAR, SBG and Landsat-NEXT). This Town Hall features the advances, findings, study design, and implementation plan for the proposed Adaptation and Response in Drylands (ARID) NASA Terrestrial Ecology Field Campaign. Our goal is to share the ARID scoping study’s determination of the big questions, data needs, and research opportunities for dryland science. We seek continued community perspectives on the most powerful and actionable approach for a multi-scale field campaign that revolutionizes the understanding, assessment, and modeling of our planet’s drylands in the context of climate impacts, mitigation and adaptation solutions, and decision-making opportunities for sustaining the Earth system and society.