SENSITIVITY OF DESERT WETLANDS TO CLIMATIC CHANGE

Desert wetlands, despite occupying a limited spatial footprint, play a critical role in arid land ecosystems and desert cultures. Wetlands in arid lands are well recognized for their high biodiversity and high rates of endemism, functioning both as museums of diversity as well as hotspots of diversification, and act as pivotal links in biogeographic corridors. Desert wetlands have also traditionally hosted many indigenous communities, whose ways of life are directly linked to the hydrology, flora, and fauna of these distinct settings. So how vulnerable are desert wetlands to climatic change? Here I examine the stability of desert wetlands over the late Pleistocene and Holocene in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Although the Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth, precipitation in the high (>6 km) Central Andes feeds shallow and deep groundwater aquifers along the Pacific slope of the Andes and in the hyper-arid Atacama Desert. Over the last two decades paleowetlands in the Atacama Desert have been studied intensely to reconstruct past climatic change and to infer changes in natural resource availability for past human cultures. Here is use this record, which includes wetland archives from various hydrogeologic settings, to assess the susceptibility of desert wetlands to climatic change. Results are then compared to other regions such as the Middle East and the American Southwest to understand the potential vulnerability of various desert wetland systems, and the communities that they support, to future climate change.