11 articles in this issue
Jaime Martinez-Valderrama,Emilio Guirado,Fernando T. Maestre
Hyper-arid, arid, semi-arid and dry-sub-humid climate zones (all of them considered drylands) occupy over 40?% of the Earth’s land surface and are home to more than 2 billion people. Contrary to the popular image of this important set of biomes, drylands ... see more
Drylands occupy approximately 40 % of the Earth's surface. Their peculiar hydrological regime, with water as the main limiting factor, together with other characteristics, such as the variability of rainfall and their ecological heterogeneity, turn these ... see more
Víctor M. Castillo Sánchez
Desertification is a controversial concept whose nature, extent, causes, and potential solutions are still debated. This paper reviews the arguments put forward for considering desertification a global environmental challenge. We also analyse the institut... see more
Laura Yahdjian,Lucas J. Carboni,Sergio Velasco Ayuso,Gaston R. Oñatibia
Livestock grazing modifies and even degrades arid ecosystems, which threatens the sustainability of livestock farming itself. It is essential to learn more about the effects of grazing on vegetation and soil to design strategies to avoid desertification, ... see more
Anahi Ocampo,América Lutz-Ley,Adriana Zuñiga,Claudia Cerda,Silvana Goirán
The drylands of Latin America sustain their countries’ economies. However, governance and economic models focused on exports and the short term have resulted in environmental injustice, unsustainable development, and the promotion of desertification. Addr... see more
Pau Carazo
To talk about life is to talk about cooperation. Its evolutionary origin, different levels of organisation, and current complexity are the result of cooperation between different biological entities. This is also the case with animal societies, including ... see more
Anna Bach Gómez
Human communities have settled very diverse geographical and climatic environments on a more or less permanent basis. Much of the archaeological evidence left by humans shows the strategies they adopted in terms of mobility, the structure of exchange netw... see more
Laureano Castro,Miguel A. Toro
Norms govern many aspects of human behaviour and facilitate coordination in cooperative activities. Regarding the origin of normativity, the most widely accepted hypothesis holds that it was shaped by processes of cultural selection between human groups w... see more
Greg Woolf
Urbanistic projects have dominated the last six thousand years of our species’ history, appearing independently on all the inhabited continents. The majority of the population already live in cities and the trend seems to be increasing. An evolutionary ap... see more
Carolyn Steel
The question of how to eat has always been central to human life. Our evolution has mirrored a series of technical innovations such as the control of fire, farming, and railways that have transformed, not just how we eat, but how we live. Our ancestors un... see more
Salva Duran-Nebreda,Sergi Valverde
The popular science fiction series Foundation penned by Isaac Asimov explores the idea that the course of the future of societies is not only predictable but can be engineered as well. In Asimov’s fictional world, a multidisciplinary science called psycho... see more