Developing cultivars with traits that can enhance and sustain productivity under climate change will be an important climate smart adaptation option. The modified CSM-CERES-Pearl millet model was used to assess yield gains by modifying plant traits determining crop maturity duration, potential yield and tolerance to drought and heat in pearl millet cultivars grown at six locations in arid (Hisa...

While much is known about the factors that control each component of the terrestrial nitrogen (N) cycle, it is less clear how these factors affect total N availability, the sum of organic and inorganic forms potentially available to microorganisms and plants. This is particularly true for N-poor ecosystems such as drylands, which are highly sensitive to climate change and desertification proces...

Climate change may significantly affect the hydrological cycle and water resource management, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. In this paper, output from the Providing Regional Climates for Impacts Studies (PRECIS) regional climate model were used in conjunction with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to analyse the effects of climate change on streamflow of the Xiying and Zamu ...

In arid/semi-arid ecosystems, biological resources, such as water, soil nutrients, and plant biomass, typically go through periods of high and low abundance. Short periods of high resource abundance are usually triggered by rainfall events, which, despite of the overall scarcity of rain, can saturate the resource demand of some biological processes for a time. This review develops the idea that...

[1] Protecting water resources for expanding human enterprise while conserving valued natural habitat is among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Global change processes such as climate change and intensive land use pose significant threats to water resources, particularly in arid regions where potential evapotranspiration far exceeds annual rainfall. Potentially compounding these sho...

Drylands cover about 40 % of the terrestrial land surface and account for approximately 40 % of global net primary productivity. Water is fundamental to the biophysical processes that sustain ecosystem function and food production, particularly in drylands where a tight coupling exists between ecosystem productivity, surface energy balance, biogeochemical cycles, and water resource availability...

Land surface albedo is a significant parameter for maintaining a balance in surface energy. It is also an important parameter of bare soil surface albedo for developing land surface process models that accurately reflect diurnal variation characteristics and the mechanism behind the solar spectral radiation albedo on bare soil surfaces and for understanding the relationships between climate fac...

The authors reconstructed May–September precipitation over the Asian continent (58–558N, 608–1358E) back to AD 1470 on the basis of tree-ring data, historical documentary records, ice core records, and the few long-term instrumental data series available in the region. They employed the method of Regularized Expectation Maximization (RegEM) and applied it to 44 subregions within the continent. ...

Landscape-scale patterns of vegetation occur worldwide at interfaces between semiarid and arid climates. They are important as potential indicators of climate change and imminent regime shifts and are widely thought to arise from positive feedback between vegetation and infiltration of rainwater. On gentle slopes the typical pattern form is bands (stripes), oriented parallel to the contours, an...

At biome-scale, terrestrial carbon uptake is controlled mainly by weather variability. Observational data from a global monitoring network indicate that the sensitivity of terrestrial carbon sequestration to mean annual temperature (T) breaks down at a threshold value of 16°C, above which terrestrial CO₂ fluxes are controlled by dryness rather than temperature. Here we show that since 1948 warm...