Osvaldo E. Sala

Osvaldo Sala is an ecologist and educator at Arizona State University, where he is the Julie A. Wrigley, Regents and Foundation Professor and the Founding Director of the Global Drylands Center, as well as founder of the Sala Lab. He is known for his research on how global change affects the functioning of global ecosystems and their biodiversity, with a focus on drylands.

Sala's work has been cited more than 73,000 times in scientific publications, including his article in Science, titled Global Biodiversity Scenarios for the Year 2100, which has been cited more than 12,000 times. Recently, Sala and University of New South Wales Professor David Eldridge launched a new journal published by Cambridge University Press, entitled Drylands,

Career

Before Sala's work at Arizona State University, he worked at Brown University as the Sloan Lindermann Distinguished Professor of Biology, where he founded and directed the Environmental Change Initiative and taught as Director of the Center for Environmental Studies (a distinguished position/title ). Sala also worked at Stanford University as a Guggenheim Fellow, as the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University and as a visiting scientist at Imperial College in Silwood Park (UK). He started his career as a Professor Ecology at his alma mater, the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. and the National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (ANCEFN) in Argentina. He was elected as Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, of the Ecological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Honorary Member of Asociación Argentina de Ecología.

Research and publications As of November 2025, Sala has co-authored over 260 peer-reviewed publications and his work has been cited more than 73,000 times as confirmed by Google Scholar. The objective of the journal is to serve as a hub of trans-disciplinary studies for drylands.