The Gayini Wetlands are an extensive but highly degraded floodplain in the drylands of Australia, dependent on the Murrumbidgee River in the Murray-Darling Basin. The country was dispossessed from the Nari Nari Aboriginal peoples during colonisation. The wetland, its original floodplain and terrestrial areas (844.17 km2) are now back in Nari Nari custodianship. The Nari Nari Tribal Council are leading restoration of their ancient land by reconnecting the original floodplain to its water, partnering with conservationists and scientists. There is a strong focus on the drivers and indicators of the ecosystems and their functions, with rigorous science collecting and analysing data to inform effective adaptive management, with progress already made towards ecological and social attributes. It is the building of trusted relationships that drives collaboration, including two-way learning, with citizen science playing an increasingly important role. Ultimately the Gayini Wetlands depend on water from the Murrumbidgee River with considerable extraction pressures for people and irrigated agriculture, further reduced by a drying climate. Restoration of the Gayini Wetlands in Australia’s drylands exemplifies strong collaboration, with strong leadership by Aboriginal people, delivering for the environment, cultural values and economic independence.

The drylands of the world constitute nearly half of our landmass (45%–50%) and provide a home to roughly 38% of humanity, or about 2.5 billion people. The drylands are arid to semi-arid, have highly variable precipitation and about 88% of the drylands are utilized as rangelands. This “dry half” of our world is commonly conceived as deforested and overgrazed, a worthless or empty wasteland that has been mismanaged for many years by destructive local populations. The received wisdom is that the drylands need to be “improved” with tree-planting, sedentarizing pastoralists, irrigated agriculture and more centralized control over environmental management. This article demonstrates that these common notions of the drylands and their people are misconceptions with a long history dating to before the colonial period. Moreover, most of these misconceptions are deeply rooted in arborocentrism, a tree-centric world view which sees trees as the “best” vegetation which belongs nearly everywhere, a view not informed by current science. Colonial ideas, especially desertification, have become institutionalized and continue to motivate development projects, like mass tree-planting, that are often misaligned with the biophysical and social realities of the drylands. The evidence reveals that drylands are valuable in many ways, play important roles in global geochemical cycles and the carbon cycle and many are high in biodiversity. Drylands are also very productive when local peoples like pastoralists and farmers are allowed to steward them with their indigenous knowledges, as they are frequently skilled at thriving with variability. All too often, though, governments and international political-economic forces use false desertification narratives to constrain local peoples from making the best uses of the drylands. The article concludes with a call to desert “desertification,” and the arborocentric notions embedded in the term, in order to liberate more scientifically accurate ways of thinking about the drylands, their inherent value and their management.

Climate change and land use (e.g., grazing, solar farms, mining) contribute to the loss of biological soil crusts (biocrusts) and associated ecosystem degradation. Biocrusts are composed of mosses, lichens, liverworts and cyanobacteria, alone or in any combination at the soil surface. Cultivating biocrusts for reintroductions into degraded ecosystems could support restoration efforts, but effective methods are still emerging. We built a fog chamber to test cultivation of two mosses (Homalothecium aureum and Syntrichia ruralis) and two lichens (Peltigera rufescens and Cladonia spp.) common in intermountain west biocrust communities. Each taxon was tested in intact and disaggregated forms. We hypothesized that disaggregated samples would grow better than the intact ones, and the mosses would grow faster than lichens. Results showed that disaggregated mosses and lichens produced a minimum of 50% more healthy tissue than intact mosses and lichens, but lichens failed to grow well in either condition. Fog cultivation may be a promising method for mosses, but not for lichens under these conditions.