Dear Colleagues,

Dryland's forests have an important role in land stabilization, desertification control, watershed protection as well as providing wood and non-wood products. Yet, its benefits and vitality are often jeopardized by human-caused climate changes and natural hazards and they are often ignored in natural resource management policy. Relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functions are context-dependent. Both plant and soil microbial diversity have been reported to regulate ecosystem functions, but how climate changes affect the links between biodiversity and functions in forests of drylands remains poorly understood.

This Special Issue "Shifts in biodiversity-ecosystem functions relationships under climate change" was created to collect scientific publications devoted to understanding biodiversity-ecosystem functions relationships. The works related to the study of climate change effects on tree biodiversity, forest ecosystem functions, soil biodiversity and soil multifunctionality, and practical applications will be interesting. This Special Issue aims to gather recent advances in studying the positive and negative influences of climate changes on ecosystems functions in dryland forests. Another important goal is to discuss in more detail possible and actual applications of the knowledge in forest management policy and decision-making processes.

Prof. Dr. Zhenhong Hu

Prof. Dr. Chengjie Ren

Guest Editors