With a growing world population and a trend towards more resource-intensive diets, pressure on land and water resources for food production will continue to increase in the coming decades. Large parts of the world rely on rainfed agriculture for their food security. In Africa, 90 % of the food production is from rainfed agriculture, generally with low yields and a high risk of crop failure. One...

Eucalyptus plantations occupy almost 20 million ha worldwide and exceed 3.7 million ha in Brazil alone. Improved genetics and silviculture have led to as much as a three-fold increase in productivity in Eucalyptus plantations in Brazil and the large land area occupied by these highly productive ecosystems raises concern over their effect on local water supplies. As part of the Brazil Potential ...

1. The International context 1.1. Potential and Actual Carbon Storage Densities of the Drylands 1.2. Rationale for Sequestering Carbon in Drylands 1.3. Dryland Soils as a Carbon Sink 1.4. Creating an Economic Linkage between Dryland Restoration and Carbon Sequestration 1.5. Carbon Offsets: What are They and How do They Help? 1.6. Validation and Verification of Carbon Stores 2. Increasing Carbon...

Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Institute for Dryland Environmental Research, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 84990 Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel, UMR CNRS-UM2-IFREMER-IRD 5119 Ecosystemes Lagunaires, University of Montpellier 2, CC093, FR-34095 Montpellier Cedex 5, France, Wyler Department of Dryland Agriculture, French Associates Instit...

Climate variability can induce uncertainty in yields, and threaten long term economic viability of rainfed agricultural enterprises in the absence of effective adaptation strategies. Enterprise mix diversification has been found to be an effective adaptation strategy for mitigating multiple sources of farm business risk in some contexts. The extent to which enterprise mix diversification can mi...

We use the context of dryland vegetation to study a general problem of complex pattern-forming systems: multiple pattern-forming instabilities that are driven by distinct mechanisms but share the same spectral properties. We find that the co-occurrence of two Turing instabilities when the driving mechanisms counteract each other in some region of the parameter space results in the growth of a s...

to study the effect of sowing date and a single irrigation (si) on yield and yield components of barley, a field experiment was conducted in dryland agricultural research institute (maragheh, iran) in 2004-06 cropping seasons, using a split plot based on a randomized complete block design with 3 replications. main plots were assigned to 3 levels of sowing date (early, normal and late). sub-plot...

in order to assess the drought tolerance in 15 lentil genotypes, a field experiment was conducted during 2001-02 growing season in dryland agricultural research institute (dari) station of shirvan, in northern khorasan, iran, under rainfed and irrigated conditions. the experimental design was rcb with three replications. data for agronomic traits of plant height, number of empty and filled pods...

(eds M.C.S. Wopereis et al.) 35 Upland environments are situated at the high end of the toposequence, where rice depends solely on rainfall as the water table is out of the reach of rice roots for much of the growing season. At the lower end of the toposequence, rice plants can reach the water table or profit directly from flood water. Along the toposequence, interactions exist between environm...