**Author details**

increases the global social crisis as feedback. Global climate change is a cause and a consequence at the same time, since draught results in desertification, however, low plant production decreases carbon sequestration, which further enhances climate change. This group of phenomena is apparently closely connected with the biodiversity crisis also as a cause and an effect. Global information crisis makes itself felt in this area as well, since new data and knowledge are increasing exponentially, see **Figure 1**. It shows the yearly number of international scientific articles with keywords desert + ecology in their abstracts according to the Scopus database, for the period 1912–2018 (downloaded on April 18, 2018, thus data for 2018

When examining the genre of these publication data (rate of document types, **Figure 2**), one can see that 90.7% of the publications are made up of primary publications (journal articles) and pre-publication (conference papers), and only 7.4% of them is synthesis (review articles, book chapters, or books). Thus, new information is produced much faster than we can orga-

Solving global problems (among them desertification problems) of mankind is mainly hindered by the lack of global coordination, which would serve the protection of the common interest and align the efforts of mankind. Solving global problems needs efficient international cooperation, aligned scientific research, aligned political decision-making, legislation

**Figure 2.** Distribution of articles with keywords desert + ecology in their abstracts according to a document type in the

are quarterly ones).

nize it into a system of thought.

8 Community and Global Ecology of Deserts

and economic regulation.

Scopus database (downloaded on April 18, 2018).

Levente Hufnagel1,2\*, Ferenc Mics1 , Melinda Pálinkás1 and Réka Homoródi2

\*Address all correspondence to: leventehufnagel@gmail.com

1 Laboratory of Biometrics and Quantitative Ecology, Institute of Crop Production, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Science, Szent István University, Gödöllő, Hungary

2 ALÖKI Applied Ecological Research and Forensic Institute Ltd, Budapest, Hungary
