Climate-based Pre-screening of Self-sustaining Regreening Opportunities in Drylands: A Case Study for Saudi Arabia

ArXi:2605.04206v1 Announce Type: new Large-scale restoration in drylands is widely promoted to address land degradation and biodiversity loss, yet many efforts rely on long-term irrigation, limiting sustainability in water-scarce regions. A key challenge is identifying locations where native vegetation can persist without intensive management while minimizing costly field campaigns. A scalable pre-screening framework is presented that integrates climate and remote sensing data to enable cost-efficient site selection in arid environments using Saudi Arabia as a.