A Spanish and French team of researchers including Universidad de Alicante (UA) researcher Santiago Soliveres, members of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, the National Agronomy Research Institute of France (INRA) and the Spanish National Research Council has studied the multiple facets of vegetable biodiversity in 123 arid and semi-arid ecosystems across the planet. The results, which are compiled in an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show the importance of scarce species and their evolutionary history to maintain land fertility and productivity in arid areas around the world.