From Paper to Practitioner: Strategies for Incorporating Soil Microorganisms into Dryland Restoration

Ubiquitous human disturbances urgently demand scalable dryland restoration, yet conventional approaches often fail under extreme climates, degraded soils, and sparse vegetation.The use of microbes in restoration offers potential utility in extreme cases.While microbes support critical ecosystem functions-from nutrient cycling to stress resilience-their practical application remains inconsistent due to context dependency and mismatched priorities.Analyzing 699 dryland restoration cases, including 190 inoculation experiments, across three decades of successful and unsuccessful case studies, we found that inoculations generally yield positive outcomes, likely due to the widespread use of locally sourced inocula.However, these successes primarily target plant growth rather than restoring broader ecosystem functions.To bridge this gap, we present MICROB, a step-by-step decision framework that transforms microbial theory into an operational tool.By prioritizing practitioner-centered needs (Make it local, Identify priorities) and acknowledging that interventions are unnecessary where functional redundancy (Redundancy and function) or concomitant recovery (Concomitant recovery) suffices, this framework ensures that microbial tools enhance-