Some like it hot: are desert plants indifferent to climate change?

Deserts rank at the forefront of vulnerability to global change because their biota is expected to encounter large climatic changes while apparently existing at biological limits. We review the available evidence for climate change effects on arid lands, and specifically on vegetation because as primary producers, plants are main providers of ecosystem services. We summarize field experiments and correlative evidence from spatial and temporal climatic gradients. Surprisingly, only few climate manipulation experiments have been conducted in semideserts, none in arid regions, and almost none in cold drylands. We argue that correlative approaches do not yield the necessary knowledge to understand and thus mitigate potential changes due to their oversight of long-term evolutionary processes. Nonetheless, the limited mechanistic evidence suggests a surprisingly high resilience of desert vegetation to changes in precipitation and CO2. We suggest this resilience is due to specific adaptations that have evolved in response to stressful and highly variable climatic conditions