Esteban Jobbágy

National Scientific and Technical Research Council | conicet · IMASL Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis

Access to water has been and remains one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Especially in arid plains exposed to significant climatic fluctuations and future global change trends. In the past and present, local communities of the arid plains of central-western Argentina (i.e., Guanacache Lagoons, Cuyo region) have developed multiple strategies to m...

In a recent speech to the UN General Assembly, Argentine President Javier Milei rejected the Pact for the Future and the 2030 Agenda, a comprehensive global framework for sustainable development encompassing ‘people, planet, and prosperity.’ This position undermines Argentina’s capacity to tackle urgent socio-environmental challenges like poverty,...

After 4.5 billion years as an evolving and dynamic planet, the Earth continues to evolve but with human‐altered dynamics. Earth scientists have special opportunities and responsibilities to accelerate our understanding of Earth's changes that are transforming our most remarkable home.

Native forests host important pools of soil organic carbon (SOC). This is a key element not only for ecosystem functioning, but also for the global carbon cycle. Globally, and particularly in Argentina, native forests are being rapidly replaced by other land uses, raising questions about the impact of these transformations on SOC and its environmen...

Silvopastoral systems (SPS) provide a range of ecosystem services, including carbon (C) sequestration. Well-managed SPS outperform grasslands, pastures, and forests in terms of C through increased soil and biomass storage. This becomes relevant for landscapes that continue to be intensely transformed for agriculture and livestock production. In thi...

Deep soil water is important for trees to survive droughts in arid and semiarid regions, but often irreversibly decrease as tree age due to limitations in soil infiltration rates and precipitation. How adaptable is the hydraulic system of trees undergoing the depletion of deep soil moisture reserves? To answer this question, we examined 12 traits c...

Wet atmospheric deposition (AD) is a crucial process that determines nutrient inputs from the atmosphere to ecosystems. It consists of two distinct processes: rainout (RO) and washout (WO). RO occurs when aerosols and gases in the free troposphere are incorporated into rainwater, while WO happens when aerosols and gases present in the atmospheric b...

Monitoring ecosystems should allow comparisons at local, regional, and continental scales. To this end, methodologies must capture the spatial and temporal variability caused by natural and anthropic factors, and metrics must be sensitive and responsive to environmental changes. Our aim in this research was to determine which ecosystem functioning...

Plain Language Summary While in ideal landscapes surface water should display the same spatial distribution across the expansion and recession stages of any flooding event, real dynamics may drift away from this expected pattern. We developed two indices based on remote sensing data to locate where these shifts are important and understand how they...

Expanding protected areas (PAs) is a worldwide endeavour aimed at addressing the biodiversity crisis and harnessing the benefits that natural ecosystems provide to humanity. However, conservation agendas often overlook the spatial geometry of PAs—shape and size—and its implications for critical issues such as agricultural encroachment, poaching, bi...

Background and aims The way in which roots distribute throughout the critical zone influences soil and critical zone formation, as well as water, nutrient and energy fluxes. Root distributions, however, are also influenced by how the critical zone functions. Rapid vegetation changes offer a valuable setting to disentangle these reciprocal effects,...

The expansion of homogeneous landscapes has been a major driver of biodiversity loss, climate change and land degradation. There is an urgent need for a transition to multifunctional landscapes that provide abundant and nutritious food while also delivering several other contributions essential for a good quality of life. However, implementing this...

Este capítulo examina la dependencia de la agricultura argentina, principalmente de soja y maíz, de las lluvias en un contexto de poca infraestructura de riego, a pesar de la abundancia de agua subterránea. Se destaca que, a diferencia de otros países productores como Estados Unidos, Argentina ha desarrollado muy poca infraestructura para riego y d...

Until recently, the development of a global geography of floods was challenged by the fragmentation and heterogeneity of in situ data and the high costs of processing large amounts of remote sensing data. Such geography would facilitate the exploration of large‐scale drivers of flood extent and timing including wide latitudinal, climate, and topogr...

Clarifying the water-root-carbon nexus in the entire root zone is crucial for unlocking the potential of afforestation in mitigating climate change. But the nexus in deep soil (depth > 1 m) remains poorly understood. Here we report contrasts in deep soil water and root distributions across 72 paired sites of adjacent farmlands, representing typical...

Regional effects of farming on hydrology are associated mostly with irrigation. In this work, we show how rainfed agriculture can also leave large-scale imprints. The extent and speed of farming expansion across the South American plains over the past four decades provide an unprecedented case of the effects of rainfed farming on hydrology. Remote...

Citation: Niborski, M.J.; Martin, O.A.; Murray, F.; Jobbágy, E.G.; Nosetto, M.D.; Paez, R.A.; Magliano, P.N. Modeling Rainwater Harvesting and Storage Dynamics of Rural Impoundments in Dry Chaco Rangelands. Water 2023, 15, 2353. Abstract: Transporting water to supply livestock is one of the great challenges of the drylands. Ranchers usually make im...

As global warming intensifies climatic extremes, the need to understand their effects on farming systems, particularly under rainfed conditions, grows. During the last three decades the Argentine Pampas, a major global grain exporter, hosted an unprecedented expansion of cultivation under unirrigated and undrained conditions. Simultaneously, the ex...

Until recently, the development of a global geography of floods was challenged by the fragmentation and heterogeneity of in situ data and the high costs of processing large amounts of remote sensing data. Such geography would facilitate the exploration of large-scale drivers of flood extent and timing including wide latitudinal, climate, and topogr...

Water is a critical resource, but ensuring its availability faces challenges from climate extremes and human intervention. In this Review, we evaluate the current and historical evolution of water resources, considering surface water and groundwater as a single, interconnected resource. Total water storage trends have varied across regions over the...

Water is a critical resource, but ensuring its availability faces challenges from climate extremes and human intervention. In this Review, we evaluate the current and historical evolution of water resources, considering surface water and groundwater as a single, interconnected resource. Total water storage trends have varied across regions over the...

Water is a critical resource, but ensuring its availability faces challenges from climate extremes and human intervention. In this Review, we evaluate the current and historical evolution of water resources, considering surface water and groundwater as a single, interconnected resource. Total water storage trends have varied across regions over the...

Livestock production in drylands requires consideration of the ecological applications of ecohydrological redistribution of water. Intensive cattle trampling and the associated increase of surface runoff are common concerns for rangeland productivity and sustainability. Here, we highlight a regional livestock production system in which cattle trail...

Nitrogen (N) is the primary driver of increased global food supply, but has environmental consequences from both under- and over-fertilisation. While over-fertilisation and reactive nitrogen release onto the environment is widespread in North America and Europe, under-fertilisation and soil mining prevail in South American croplands, calling for no...

Soil moisture plays a key role in hydrological processes in ecosystems and regulates water and energy exchanges between the surface and the atmosphere. Global coverage of surface soil moisture (SSM) satellite estimates makes them a fundamental source of information, while the validation of these estimates is usually based on in situ measurements, i...

Irrigated cropland changes in arid regions have strong implications for food production, water demand, crop and groundwater sustainability. The oases of Central-Western Argentina constitute one of the largest irrigated areas across South America. The aim of this paper is to study the spatial and temporal dynamics of the irrigated lands in Central-W...

Ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungal communities that associate with invading pines (Pinus spp.) are expected to be poor in species diversity. However, long-term successional trajectories and the persistence of dispersal limitations of EM fungi in the exotic range are not well understood. We sampled the roots and surrounding soil of Pinus elliottii and P. t...

Las ciudades dependen de distintos ecosistemas que les proveen servicios. Para el caso de la provisión de agua potable y la disposición de aguas servidas en las ciudades argentinas, el reconocimiento de esto aún es incompleto y fragmentado. Aquí presentamos la primera base de datos que mapea y clasifica las fuentes de suministro de agua y destinos...

Las lagunas del oeste de la región pampeana presentan una gran heterogeneidad espacial y temporal, no sólo en su tamaño, sino también en su salinidad y contenido de nutrientes y, por ende, en su turbidez, contenido de clorofila y sedimentos. Aprovechando la amplia disponibilidad de información provista por sensores remotos y muestreos a campo, este...

The wicked nature of sustainability challenges facing food systems demands intentional and synergistic actions at multiple scales and sectors. The Southern Cone of Latin America, with its historical legacy of “feeding the world,” presents interesting opportunities for generating insights into potential trajectories and processes for food system tra...

Our understanding of the geomorphological processes that drive river formation and hydrological settings that favour them is still under development, facing the difficulties of knowledge fragmentation and the mismatch of temporal scales, particularly in arid or semi-arid regions. In this study, we provided new evidence on the link between river for...

En las últimas décadas, la transformación de los sistemas ecológicos dio lugar a la formación de ‘neo-ecosistemas’. En las llanuras del Chaco Seco-Espinal argentino, la expansión agrícola en reemplazo de bosques, arbustales y pastizales naturales ha generado excedentes hídricos, lo que favoreció la formación de neo-humedales caracterizados por un a...

Ecología Austral celebrates its first 30 years of life with this special issue. This issue gathers a small sample of what Argentine ecology can offer to the region and the world: quality science achieved with scarce means, but with a creative use of opportunities to advance knowledge. Our perspective and context allow us to cover a wide variety of...

The establishment of tree plantations on native grasslands is expanding in Argentina and Uruguay, prometed by public incentives and, likely, by an emerging market of carbon sequestration. We assessed how this transformation affects the production of ecosystem goods and services, synthesizing preexisting and original information on their influence o...

Important progress has been made in recent years in characterizing surface soil moisture (SSM) at regional scales, through remote sensing estimates and the implementation of new in situ networks. Each of these sources of information has intrinsic features, such as the dynamic range of the SSM and the temporal frequency of acquisition. Another relev...

Humans place strong pressure on land and have modified around 75% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. In this context, ecoregions and biomes, merely defined on the basis of their biophysical features, are incomplete characterizations of the territory. Land system science requires classification schemes that incorporate both social and biophysical dimen...

Adaptive water governance involves collaboration among multiple actors, social learning, and flexibility to deal with shocks and surprises. Crises thus become a useful context to assess how the institutional arrangements contribute to adaptation. However, an important part of the specialized literature has focused on these issues as they occur in h...

GovernAgua foi um projeto de pesquisa acadêmica internacional que adotou um enfoque transdisciplinar para entender e promover uma governança adaptativa e antecipatória da água na América do Sul. O objetivo principal do projeto foi melhorar a qualidade de vida humana e a capacidade das bacias em proporcionar serviços ecossistêmicos relacionados à ág...

Criaturas de Agua es una miniserie documental que relata el ciclo del agua en los paisajes semiáridos, a través de los ojos de quienes pueblan este contexto, lo trabajan y lo investigan. La serie está compuesta por 6 capítulos donde se trata en cada uno un fenómeno hídrico como una criatura viva y cambiante. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...

The Pampas plains of southern South America were predominantly dry, eolian-shaped landscapes, besides some interposed humid phases, during most of the late Pleistocene-Middle Holocene, evolving to humid-subhumid grasslands hosting an increasingly large number of shallow lakes in the late Holocene. These lakes proved to preserve in their sediments w...

The livestock sector contributes significantly to the resource-use and pollution from food systems. Therefore, assessing the current and future environmental impacts of livestock production under different systems in different countries, has become an important area of solution-oriented research in sustainability science. We performed a cradle-to-f...

La laguna Nassau se ubica en la planicie arenosa de la provincia de San Luis, bajo un régimen climático semiárido, donde se registran altas tasas de evaporación. El objetivo de este trabajo es caracterizar químicamente y analizar la evolución química de las aguas de esta laguna. Para ello se tomaron muestras de agua superficial y subterránea en abr...

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, gene...

Las regiones áridas tienen déficit hídrico a lo largo de todo el año, lo cual limita el crecimiento de la vegetación y la provisión de agua para bebida animal. El Chaco Árido (~10 Mha) sostiene una producción ganadera extensiva de baja inversión, basada en cosechar agua de lluvia en represas (tajamares) como principal fuente de abastecimiento de ag...

Rainfall partitioning by plant canopies can play key roles in dryland ecohydrology by altering the amount, timing and patterns of water receipt to soils. Here, we synthesized interception, throughfall and stemflow observations from 2,297 rainfall events across 40 dryland sites, including 48 plant species. Then, we developed general empirical models...

Diets link human health with environmental sustainability, offering promising pressure points to enhance the sustainability of food systems. We investigated the health, environmental, and economic dimensions of the current diet in Argentina and the possible effects of six dietary change scenarios on nutrient adequacy, dietary quality, food expendit...

The Dry Chaco in South America is a semi-arid ecoregion prone to dryland salinization. In this region, we investigated coarse-scale surface soil moisture ( SM ), soil temperature, soil salinity, and vegetation, using L-band microwave brightness temperature ( T_B ) observations and retrievals from the soil moisture ocean salinity (SMOS)...

Understanding the hydrological functioning of the scarce freshwater bodies of semiarid regions is crucial, especially in those areas affected by anthropic activities involving land-use changes. In the dry western edge of the Argentina Pampean plains, a system of more than 100 shallow lakes of remarkable stability occurs. These lakes exhibit low sal...

Sustainability requires a combination of meaningful co-production of locally relevant solutions, synthesis of insights gained across regions, and increased cooperation between science, policy and practice. The Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) has been coordinating Place-Based Social-Ecological Sustainability Research (PBSESR) acros...

Al oeste de la llanura pampeana existe un extenso manto eólico conocido como Mar de Arena Pampeano (Iriondo y Kröhling, 1995). Particularmente, en el centro-sur de la provincia de San Luis, este manto está compuesto por sedimentos arenosos con proporciones variables de cuarzo, feldespatos y fragmentos de roca, principalmente de origen volcánico, ju...

In the southeastern portion of San Luis Province (33°53’10’’-34°19’00’’ S and 65°42’00’’-65°20’00’’ W), the sand dune landscape hosts a lacustrine system with more than 200 water bodies, where the water table reaches the surface and fills the deepest depressions. The aim of this study is to analyze surface-groundwater interactions using the radioac...

El agua media o protagoniza muchas de las contribuciones de la naturaleza a los seres humanos. Este artículo explora y ejemplifica la representación espacial de la oferta y la demanda de servicios ecosistémicos relacionados con el agua y su aplicación a distintas necesidades de la gestión y la política ambiental, con particular foco en la Argentina...

Pines (Pinus spp.) rely on co-introduced ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi to invade native ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere. Although co-invasive EM fungal communities are expected to be poor in species, long-term successional trajectories and the persistence of dispersal limitations are not well understood. We sampled the roots and surrounding soil...

Los ecosistemas ofrecen servicios hídricos claves a la población, como la provisión de agua potable y la depuración de efluentes. Los estudios de servicios hídricos suelen realizarse a escala de cuenca, enfocados desde la oferta. Sin embargo, este enfoque ignora relaciones hídricas complejas entre las ciudades y el territorio causadas por la transf...

El almacenamiento de agua en el suelo es una variable que controla múltiples procesos y retroalimentaciones dentro del sistema climático, interviniendo en los balances de agua y energía. En los últimos años se han realizado importantes avances en la caracterización de la humedad del suelo (SM, por sus siglas en inglés Soil Moisture) a escala region...

Chemical changes produced by the establishment of tree plantations on grasslands occupying sedimentary plains could potentially impact their highly productive soils through multiple mechanisms. Some of the reported chemical changes following this vegetation shift include soil salinization, sodification, alkalization and acidification. While the ass...

Our understanding of how groundwater mediates evapotranspiration/streamflow partitioning is still fragmented and catchment studies under changing vegetation conditions can provide a useful frame for integration. We explored this partition in a flat sedimentary dry catchment in central Argentina in which the replacement of native vegetation with rai...

Los ecosistemas acuáticos continentales (EAC) constituyen elementos de gran valor natural, social y cultural. Además, son sumideros naturales de distintos procesos que involucran la interfase agua-tierraatmósfera y, por lo tanto, los primeros a nivel territorial en mostrar síntomas de deterioro ambiental. En este artículo analizamos el enfoque de l...

Land use changes affecting ecological and hydrological processes often shape the biogeochemistry of deserts. As highly productive hotspots, Prosopis flexuosa woodlands located in interdune lowlands of the Monte Desert are subject to intense transformations by humans and livestock and offer a unique opportunity to understand how phreatophyte vegetat...

En gran parte de la región pampeana argentina, la napa freática se encuentra muy cercana a la superficie del terreno por lo que influye directamente sobre distintos aspectos de los agro-ecosistemas. Tanto es así, que en períodos húmedos los ascensos freáticos al alcanzar la superficie generan grandes eventos de inundación. A pesar del rol clave que...

Land-use change has been the strongest driver of vegetation cover change in the world. In the South American Dry Chaco (~1 M km²; PPT/ET0 < 0.65), native dry forests are experiencing high deforestation rates that tend to continue in the coming years. Here, we used a hydrological model (Hydrus 1-D) to analyze changes in the water balance triggered b...

En gran parte de la región pampeana argentina el techo de la zona saturada del perfil de suelo/sedimento (i.e. napa freáti-ca) se encuentra cercana a la superficie e influencia diversos aspectos de los (agro)ecosistemas. A pesar de jugar un papel clave en la producción agropecuaria, no existe una base de datos unificada que permita conocer la varia...

En paisajes donde las redes de drenaje y las depresiones topográficas están bien definidas y no sufren modificaciones, las inundaciones suelen desarrollarse de forma "coherente". Es decir, respetando una secuencia de zonas que se van cubriendo (descubriendo) de agua progresivamente a medida que la fracción inundada de un territorio aumenta (disminu...

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] is one of the most important crops worldwide, and Argentina is the third largest global grain producer and the worlds´ largest meal exporter. Under the continuous challenge of increasing crop yields, especially in the central temperate region of the country, there is a growing need to optimize management in relation...

The process of soil drying following a single rainfall input offers an integrated perspective on soil-vegetation water dynamics in responses to atmospheric conditions during periods without rainfall. In this work, the soil moisture dry-down time scale events (τ) was calculated using surface soil moisture data from the SMOS mission, with the objecti...