Osvaldo Sala
· Regents' Professor, School of SustainabilityArizona State University · School of Sustainability
Active 1953–2026
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About
Osvaldo Sala is the Julie A. Wrigley, Regents, and Foundation Professor at Arizona State University, contributing to the School of Life Sciences, School of Sustainability, and School of Transborder Studies. He is the Founding Director of the Global Drylands Center and serves as Special Advisor to the Provost. Prior to joining ASU in 2010, he was at Brown University where he was the founding Director of the Environmental Change Initiative and the Sloan Lindemann Professor of Biology. His work is highly cited in ecology, sustainability, and biology, with 260 publications, over 72,000 citations, and an H-index of 114. His influential 2000 Science paper "Global Biodiversity Scenarios for the year 2100" has been cited more than 12,000 times. Sala's research is interdisciplinary, collaborating with geologists, social scientists, mathematicians, and humanists, and employs a variety of methods from experimentation to simulation modeling. He is well known for his field experiments in drylands conducted worldwide, including Patagonia, the Kalahari Desert, the Loess Plateau in China, and various U.S. ecosystems such as the Shortgrass steppe and Chihuahuan Desert. He maintains active scientific collaborations globally and leads a research lab at ASU supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, USDA, and Department of Energy. Sala's research interests focus on the functioning of arid ecosystems, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and the impacts of climate change,…
Research topics
- Ecology
- Biology
- Environmental science
- Geography
- Political Science
- Environmental resource management
- Geology
- Environmental planning
- Agroforestry
- Soil science
Selected publications
Grazing and ecosystem service delivery in global drylands
Science · 2022 · 364 citations
Grazing represents the most extensive use of land worldwide. Yet its impacts on ecosystem services remain uncertain because pervasive interactions between grazing pressure, climate, soil properties, and biodiversity may occur but have never been addressed simultaneously. Using a standardized survey at 98 sites across six continents, we show that interactions between grazing pressure, climate, soil, and biodiversity are critical to explain the delivery of fundamental ecosystem services across dry…
Expert perspectives on global biodiversity loss and its drivers and impacts on people
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment · 2022 · 268 citations
Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of biodiversity experts worldwide, we conducted a survey and asked experts to focus on the taxa and freshwater, terrestrial, or marine ecosystem with which…
Extreme drought impacts have been underestimated in grasslands and shrublands globally
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-01-08 · 163 citations
articleOpen accessClimate change is increasing the frequency and severity of short-term (~1 y) drought events-the most common duration of drought-globally. Yet the impact of this intensification of drought on ecosystem functioning remains poorly resolved. This is due in part to the widely disparate approaches ecologists have employed to study drought, variation in the severity and duration of drought studied, and differences among ecosystems in vegetation, edaphic and climatic attributes that can mediate drought…
Global patterns and climatic controls of belowground net carbon fixation
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 118 citations
Senior authorCorresponding, accounting for 46% of total terrestrial carbon fixation. Across biomes, belowground productivity increases with mean annual precipitation, although the rate of increase diminishes with increasing precipitation. The fraction of total net productivity allocated belowground exceeds 50% in a large fraction of terrestrial ecosystems and decreases from arid to humid ecosystems. This work adds to our understanding of the belowground carbon productivity response to climate change and provides a compre…
Unforeseen plant phenotypic diversity in a dry and grazed world
Nature · 2024-08-07 · 84 citations
articleOpen access
Recent grants
NSF · $50k · 2012–2013
NSF · $590k · 2015–2020
NSF · $520k · 2018–2025
Frequent coauthors
- 58 shared
Laura Yahdjian
Agricultural Plant Physiology and Ecology Research Institute
- 58 shared
Ana L. Scopel
Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics
- 46 shared
Amy T. Austin
Agricultural Plant Physiology and Ecology Research Institute
- 44 shared
Debra P. C. Peters
Agricultural Research Service
- 44 shared
José M. Paruelo
Instituto Nacional de Investigación Agropecuaria
- 40 shared
William K. Lauenroth
Yale University
- 34 shared
Oumarou Malam Issa
Sorbonne Université
- 34 shared
Carlos L. Ballaré
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Education
Ph.D.
Colorado State University
Awards & honors
- Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Member of the Argentinean National Academy of Sciences
- Member of the Argentinean National Academy of Physical and N…
- Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation
- Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…
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