About this Research Topic
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 a number of different types of restorative actions whose practitioners may not even realize their projects are linked.
This Research Topic seeks to synthesize restoration actions across the planet that are contributing toward 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 seek 12-20 manuscripts from scientists from a diversity of continents, countries, climates, and cultures that synthesize the science behind restoration of the water cycle as viewed from their area of expertise, their culture, and their ecosystem(s) of study. Contributions are invited 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
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.