DROUGHT-NET

All ecosystems will be impacted to some extent by climate change, with forecasts for more frequent and severe drought likely to have the greatest impact on terrestrial ecosystems. Terrestrial ecosystems are known to vary dramatically in their responses to drought. However, the mechanistic basis underlying why some ecosystems respond more than others represents a critical knowledge gap, one that limits our ability to project drought impacts at regional and continental scales. To effectively forecast terrestrial ecosystem responses to drought, ecologists must determine the mechanisms underlying ecosystem sensitivity to drought across a range of different ecosystem types, and then improve existing modeling frameworks by incorporating such variation within the context of broader environmental gradients. Traditional site-based approaches cannot provide this knowledge because site-specific experiments are conducted in ways that makes comparisons among ecosystems difficult. Coordinated..