Historical reconstruction unveils the risk of mass mortality and ecosystem collapse during pancontinental megadrought

An important new hypothesis in landscape ecology is that extreme, decade-scale megadroughts can be potent drivers of rapid, macroscale ecosystem degradation and collapse. If true, an increase in such events under climate change could have devastating consequences for global biodiversity. However, because few megadroughts have occurred in the modern ecological era, the taxonomic breadth, trophic depth, and geographic pattern of these impacts...