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Dual use of solar power plants as biocrust nurseries for large-scale arid soil restoration

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Abstract

Large portions of global arid lands are under severe, increasing anthropogenic stress, their soils progressively degrading or already degraded. The interventional regeneration of the natural cover of these soils—photosynthetic communities known as biocrusts that armour them against erosion and fertilize them—is currently regarded as promising for dryland restoration and sustainability. Technologies for biocrust restoration developed during the past decades are, however, invariably of high effort and low capacity, constraining application to small spatial scales. We tested the notion that crustivoltaics, where solar power plants are used as ad hoc biocrusts nurseries, can break this scaling barrier. We show experimentally that solar plants indeed promote the formation of biocrust over neighbouring soils, doubling biocrust biomass and tripling biocrust cover, and that after biocrust harvesting, recovery is swift particularly if re-inoculated. Our results point to a mode of continuous dual operation that is not only effective and socioeconomically attractive but can also increase capacity by orders of magnitude to reach regional scales.

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Fig. 1: Placement of survey and experimental inoculation plots at the Poly Mount 2 solar farm with respect to layout of PV rows.
Fig. 2: Microbial community composition of natural, nursery-grown and solar farm grown biocrusts.
Fig. 3: Distribution of biocrust development in survey plots according to their position with respect to solar panels.
Fig. 4: Temporal dynamics and rainfall dependence of biocrust recovery after harvesting inside the PV installation.
Fig. 5: Effect of inoculum type on end-point biocrust development and recovery rates.
Fig. 6: Abstracted flow-through chart for the continuous operation of a PV installation under the crustivoltaic approach.

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Data availability

Molecular sequence data for strain and microbial community analyses are freely available from NCBI under bioproject number PRJNA899057. Context databases used for phylogenetic placement are available at https://github.com/anagiraldo/Crustivoltaics. All other source data used in graphical displays or statistical analyses are provided as supplementary files. Weather records used for context are available at https://alert.fcd.maricopa.gov/alert/Google/v3/gmap.htmlSource data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

No specific code was used in this research.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation through the ERC’s Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (NSF grant no. ENG 1449501 - FGP). During this research J.B. was also supported by a scholarship from ASU’s graduate college. We thank E. Vivoni for access to climate records and the leadership of Clearway Energy for providing continued access to the solar plant and for encouragement of our project.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Ana Mercedes Heredia-Velásquez, Ana Giraldo-Silva.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics and School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Ana Mercedes Heredia-Velásquez, Ana Giraldo-Silva, Corey Nelson, Julie Bethany, Patrick Kut, Luis González-de-Salceda & Ferran Garcia-Pichel

  2. Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Applied Biology (IMAB), Public University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

    Ana Giraldo-Silva

  3. Allonnia, Boston, MA, USA

    Corey Nelson

  4. Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Julie Bethany

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  1. Ana Mercedes Heredia-Velásquez
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Contributions

A.M.H.-V., A.G.-S., C.N., J.B. and F.G.-P. were responsible for experimental and methodological design. A.M.H.-V., A.G.-S., C.N., J.B., L.G.d.S. and P.K. were responsible for sampling and sample processing. A.M.H.-V. was responsible for statistical analyses and meteorological data processing. A.G.-S. conducted microbial isolation and bioinformatics. A.G.-S. and C.N. performed inoculum production. F.G.-P. was responsible for conceptualization, funding acquisition, paper writing and preparation of displays. All authors read and edited the paper.

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Correspondence to Ferran Garcia-Pichel.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Yaron Ziv and Michala Phillips for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Heredia-Velásquez, A.M., Giraldo-Silva, A., Nelson, C. et al. Dual use of solar power plants as biocrust nurseries for large-scale arid soil restoration. Nat Sustain 6, 955–964 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01106-8

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