The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity visited two active wind-blown sand dunes within Gale crater, Mars, which provided the first ground-based opportunity to compare Martian and terrestrial eolian dune sedimentary processes and study a modern analog for the Martian eolian rock record. Orbital and rover images of these dunes reveal terrestrial-like and uniquely Martian processes. The prese...

Despite radically different environmental conditions, terrestrial and martian dunes bear a strong resemblance, indicating that the basic processes of saltation and grainfall (sand avalanching down the dune slipface) operate on both worlds. Here, we show that martian dunes are subject to an additional modification process not found on Earth: springtime sublimation of Mars' CO(2) seasonal polar c...

The principal aim of this article is the presentation of EpsiMu, a tool for dielectric properties measurement. This general tool can be used to characterize all types of materials, but in this article we apply it to porous or granular materials. The tool consists of a coaxial cell and dedicated software that allow us to reconstruct the permittivity in almost real-time by a de-embedding process....

We tested the role of interspecific competition in driving species distribution at multiple spatial scales using two sibling species of Galerida larks (G. cristata and G. theklae) in Morocco (sympatry), Balearic islands (G. theklae only) and Israel (G. cristata only). We first investigated regional-scale determinants by contrasting allopatric versus sympatric patterns in five distinct habitat t...

The sand dunes and inter-dune zones of the hyper-arid central Namib Desert represent heterogeneous soil habitats. As little is known about their indigenous edaphic bacterial communities, we aimed to evaluate their diversity and factors of assembly and hypothesized that soil physicochemistry gradients would strongly shape dune/interdune communities. We sampled a total of 125 samples from 5 paral...

Relations of landform types to wind regimes, bedrock composition, sediment supply, and topography are shown by field studies and satellite photographs of the Western Desert of Egypt. This desert, which lies at the core of the largest hyperarid region on earth, provides analogs of Martian wind-formed features. These include sand dunes, alternating light and dark streaks, knob 'shadows,' and yard...

We present a novel real-time method for simulating aeolian sand transport and dune propagation. Our is GPU-based extension of the Desertscapes Simulation propagation model to additionally capture echo dunes obstacle interaction. validate our by comparing it against an existing study evolution in wind tunnel environment. Additionally, we demonstrate significantly improved performance via compari...

In the dunes of the Pouto Peninsula, north Kaipara, Northland, re-mobilised sand is invading remnants of native forest and scrub, and filling dune lakes and swamps. Some of the affected native vegetation is botanically important as remnants of regionally and even nationally rare plant communities and as the habitats of threatened plant species. The wetlands are important waterbird habitats. At ...

The measurement of wind erosion is not only important to understand wind erosion itself, but also an important scientific step in efforts to reverse the process of desertification. This study develops a model that predicts sand transport flux at pixel level based on the quantitative relationship between remotely sensed vegetation coverage and observed sand transport rate data. The data were col...

Wind erosion is considered a major global environmental problem. Dust storms from the migration of sand dunes can seriously damage civil, industrial, and agricultural areas and a method to stabilize these sand dunes is mulching. The present study investigates the feasibility of using organic wastes of Press mud and Dunder with clay for the production of environmentally-friendly mulches. Sandy s...