Rehydrating Planet Earth

Climate change and a rapidly expanding human population have degraded terrestrial ecosystems across the planet, often desiccating landscapes and reducing freshwater availability. There is a rapidly growing global environmental restoration movement to combat this degradation and its effects on the hydrological cycle and freshwater resources for human use and environmental protection. A particular emphasis exists on restoring freshwater hydrology because many societies and cultures are freshwater limited and because of the central importance of freshwater to human survival.

Notably, the United Nations declared 2011-2020 the “Decade for Deserts and the Fight Against Desertification” and then followed up by calling 2021-2030 the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.” The cycling of water operates on large scales as it falls from the sky, moves across landscape surfaces, seeps into the ground, discharges to the ocean, and evaporates back to the atmosphere. Thus, effective restoration of water cycles requires integration and coordination of individual restoration projects across large spatial scales and involves several different types of restorative actions whose practitioners may not even realize their projects are linked.

This Research Topic aims to synthesize restoration actions across the planet that are contributing toward the regeneration of water cycling, hydrologic connectivity, and increasing the availability of fresh water for ecosystem functions and human use, particularly in ecosystems that are desiccating or experiencing desertification. Using different languages, words, and concepts, cultures throughout the world are quietly innovating ways to restore water cycling and improve water availability, but often seemingly without awareness of similar actions in other regions or how their actions are hydrologically linked with other projects in the same watershed. We are particularly interested in the synthesis of watershed or landscape-level restoration efforts that provide vivid examples of how the scaling up of restoration efforts can have synergistic effects on water cycling or recycling that small-scale projects cannot attain on their own.

We will accept the following article types: Original Research, Review, Methods, and Perspective. To gather further insights into the global restoration of water cycles, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
• Upscaling hydrological effects of localized restoration to the global water budget
• Effects of vegetation and large-scale restoration on hydrology and climate feedbacks
• Effects of soil management on hydrology and climate
• Restoration of freshwater ecosystems and hydrology
• Precipitation recycling and harvesting
• Dryland evapotranspiration
• Restoration of local water balances
• Distribution of ecohydrological processes

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Climate change, Terrestrial ecosystems, Degradation, Freshwater availability, Environmental restoration, Desertification, Water cycle, Precipitation recycling, Ecosystem restoration

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.