Title: Messianic breath of soil cyanobacteria to revive the degraded soils in the desert environments

Abstract

Inherent geological characteristics and harsh climatic conditions have brought a rough face to the arid environments, areas with great fragility to environmental perturbations but with extraordinary ecosystems of life. Sodic and saline soils of arid-lands categorized under aridisols and solonchak are the major natural resources of these zones to exhibit a unique fauna and flora, as well as the production, life, and climate system in the environments. In these hyper conditions, a biological microorganism or being from soil microbial communities has been living for billions of years with the name of Cyanobacteria. Susceptible ecosystem and fragile resilience of arid environments cause high vulnerability of aridisols to human activities and climate change. Soil degradation will lead to environmental threats, the extinction of animals and plants, the reduction of biodiversity, water loss, and disruption of water and carbon cycles. Ecological regeneration by native cyanobacteria living at the surface of aridic soils is a biotechnological idea to revive the collapsed soils as they play vital roles in the aridisols by fixing C/N and synthesizing exopolysaccharides, which increase soil fertility and water retention and improve soil structure and stability. This presentation tries to introduce the restoring power of these ecological primers related to revive degraded soils which has provided great hope for the recovery and restoration of degraded ecosystems of Iran, a country with more than 85% arid areas. Inoculation of biological crusts, particularly cyanobacteria, has had positive results on improving soil conditions and restoring degraded soils. the findings have been shown that cyanobacteria by improving the physicochemical parameters of soil such as increasing moisture, nitrogen, and carbon accelerate the establishment of vegetation, increase soil aggregates stability, as well as remediation of saline-alkaline soils, absorption of soil contaminants, and immobilize of heavy metals. On the other hand, pedogenesis, dust capturing, retention of aggregates by secreted exopolysaccharides (EPS) and increasing the amount of soluble nutrients in the soil by producing organic acids are consequences of cyanobacteria inoculation into aridisols that lead to improve soil properties considering biological characteristics that can play an effective role in ecological recovery.