More on the science:

 

The overarching goals of U-TURN are the disentanglement of climatic and anthropogenic drivers and the assessment of proxies for early warning of turning points in ecosystem functioning.

 

We therefore set the following research objectives:

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[1] Mapping and characterizing turning points in EF in global drylands to size the importance of the issue of turning points and to select focus areas for further analyses (Global) ;

[2] Parametrizing Dynamical Vegetation Models (DVMs) to dryland specific conditions through EO data assimilation to enable accurate simulation of drylands vegetation dynamics (Focus areas);

[3] Reconstructing the history of land use/cover change (LULCC) for the AVHRR era based on dense stack of high resolution (HR) images to gain insights in the LULCC drivers/implications of turning points and adequately parametrize their contributions within the DVMs (Focus areas) ;

[4] Disentangling climatic and anthropogenic drivers of turning points relying on paired analysis of EO-based and process-based approaches informing on the nature of the drivers (Focus areas) ;

[5] Assessing two proxies for early warning of turning points in EF, precursors in simulated vegetation stability and critical eco-climatic thresholds (Focus areas).

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To achieve these objectives UTURN will combine long time series of (i) satellite data (e.g. AVHRR, Landsat, SPOT); (ii) gridded climate data and scenarios; and (iii) in-situ measurements.