The performance of coordinated distributed experiments designed to compare ecosystem sensitivity to global-change drivers depends on whether they cover a significant proportion of the global range of environmental variables. In the present article, we described the global distribution of climatic and soil variables and quantified main differences among continents. Then, as a test case, we assessed the representativeness of the International Drought Experiment (IDE) in parameter space. Considering the global environmental variability at this scale, the different continents harbor unique combinations of parameters. As such, coordinated experiments set up across a single continent may fail to capture the full extent of global variation in climate and soil parameter space. IDE with representation on all continents has the potential to address global scale hypotheses about ecosystem sensitivity to environmental change. Our results provide a unique vision of climate and soil variability at the global scale and highlight the need to design globally distributed networks.

中文翻译：

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为什么协调分布式实验应该走向全球

旨在比较生态系统对全球变化驱动因素的敏感性的协调分布式实验的性能取决于它们是否涵盖了全球环境变量范围的很大一部分。在本文中，我们描述了气候和土壤变量的全球分布，并量化了各大洲之间的主要差异。然后，作为一个测试用例，我们评估了国际干旱实验（IDE）在参数空间中的代表性。考虑到这种规模的全球环境变化，不同大陆拥有独特的参数组合。因此，在一个大陆上建立的协调实验可能无法捕捉到全球气候和土壤参数空间变化的全部范围。在各大洲都有代表的 IDE 有可能解决有关生态系统对环境变化敏感性的全球规模假设。我们的结果为全球范围内的气候和土壤变化提供了独特的视角，并强调了设计全球分布式网络的必要性。