Dryland ecosystems cover 40% of our planet’s land surface, support the lives of billions of people, and are responding dramatically to the combined effects of climate and land use change. These expansive and diverse systems also dominate core aspects of Earth’s climate, storing and exchanging vast amounts of water, carbon, and energy with the atmosphere. Despite the indispensable natural resources and ecosystem services provided by drylands and their high vulnerability to change, drylands are one of the most, if not the most, poorly understood ecosystem types. Such lack of study has been in part due to incorrect historical assumptions that drylands are unproductive “wastelands”. This lack of understanding results in notably poor model representation and forecasting capacity, hindering our representation and decision making for these vulnerable ecosystems. The NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program solicited proposals for a multi-year field campaign, of which Adaptation and Response in Drylands (ARID) was one of two scoping studies selected. With the goal of gathering input from the scientific and data end-user communities, we provide an overview of our ARID kick-off meeting with over 300 in-person and virtual participants held in October 2023 at the University of Arizona. This meeting gathered insights from public and private data end-users and scientists. We also report on follow-up activities that have taken place since then, including town halls, community surveys, and international engagements.

The time it takes for an ecosystem to recover is a key aspect of environmental disturbance. Conventionally, recovery is defined as a return to the pre-disturbance state, assuming ecosystem stationarity. However, this view does not account for the impact of external forces like climate change. We propose a counterfactual approach, viewing recovery as the state the ecosystem would achieve without the disturbance. This redefines recovery time as the period until the ecosystem reaches its counterfactual state. Through a case study on the greening of the Arctic and Boreal regions, we present evidence demonstrating significant disparities between counterfactual and conventional recovery time estimates. The well-documented greening of the region serves as an external force, introducing non-stationary dynamics that result in a counterfactual recovery time twice as long as the conventional view. We advocate for embracing the counterfactual definition of recovery, as it aligns more realistically with informed decision-making.