Green roofs have many benefits, but in countries with semiarid climates the amount of water needed for irrigation is a limiting factor for their maintenance. The use of drought-tolerant plants such as Sedum species, reduces the water requirements in the dry season, but, even so, in semiarid environments these can reach up to 60 L m-2 per day. Continuous substrate/soil water content monitoring w...

N2-fixing, drought tolerant and multipurpose Acacia and Prosopis species are appropriate trees for reforestation of degraded areas in arid and semiarid regions of the tropics and subtropics. Acacia and Prosopis trees form N2-fixing nodules with a wide range of rhizobia, for example African acacias mainly with Sinorhizobium sp. and Mesorhizobium sp., and Australian acacias with Bradyrhizobium sp...

which generally have little or no vegetation, produce runoff; sink areas, located downslope of the source arIn many semiarid regions, runoff and erosion differ according to eas, receive and store the runoff and thereby become vegetation patch type. These differences, although hypothesized to fundamentally affect ecological processes, have been poorly quantienriched and relatively productive. Th...

The Loess Plateau of China is one of the most fragile ecosystems worldwide; thus, human production activities need to be conducted very cautiously. In this study, MiSeq high-throughput sequencing was applied to assess the relationship between bacterial and fungal community structures and changes in vegetation and soil physical and chemical properties induced by grazing, in four grasslands with ...

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...

in agroforestry landscapes, land use, and the associated management practices exert strong impacts upon soil organic carbon stocks. data on the soil organic carbon were collected for different land-use types within a small watershed, el salado, located in lanjarón (se spain). eight land-use types namely: farmland planted in olive, almond, and cereals; forest with pinus halepensis mill. and pinu...

OBJECTIVE Unreclaimed mine tailings sites are a worldwide problem, with thousands of unvegetated, exposed tailings piles presenting a source of contamination for nearby communities. Tailings disposal sites in arid and semiarid environments are especially subject to eolian dispersion and water erosion. Phytostabilization, the use of plants for in situ stabilization of tailings and metal contamin...

Soil depth is an important input parameter in hydrological and ecological modeling. Presently, the soil depth data available in national soil databases (STATSGO, SSURGO) is provided as averages within generalized land units. Spatial uncertainty within these units limits their applicability for spatially distributed modeling. This work reports a statistical model for prediction of soil depth in ...

Different grazing strategies impact grassland plant production and may also regulate the soil carbon formation. For a site in semiarid temperate steppe, we studied the effect of combinations of rest, high and moderate grazing pressure over three stages of the growing season, on the process involved in soil carbon sequestration. Results show that constant moderate grazing (MMM) exhibited the hig...