The Pleistocene global dispersal of modern humans required the transit of arid and semiarid regions where the distribution of potable water provided a primary constraint on dispersal pathways. Here, we provide a spatially explicit continental-scale assessment of the opportunities for Pleistocene human occupation of Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. We establish the location an...

[1] Semiarid rangelands are a significant global sink for methane (CH4), but this sink strength may be altered by climate change. Methane uptake is sensitive to soil moisture showing a hump‐shaped relationship with a distinct optimum soil moisture level. Both CO2 and temperature affect soil moisture, but the direction of CH4 uptake response may depend on if the system is below or above the soil...

Semiarid environments throughout the world have lost a major part of their woody vegetation and biodiversity due to the effects of wood cutting, cattle grazing and subsistence agriculture. The resulting state is typically used for cattle production, but the productivity of these systems is often very low, and erosion of the unprotected soil is a common problem. Such dry-land degradation is of g...

The management of water resources in arid and semiarid areas has long been a challenge, from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern southwestern United States. As our understanding of the hydrological and climatological cycles has improved, and our ability to manipulate the hydrologic cycle has increased, so too have the challenges associated with managing a limited natural resource for a growing po...

This paper documents a significant impact of climate variation on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily in arid countries. By lowering farm incomes, reduced moisture availability encourages migration to nearby cities, while wetter conditions slow it. The paper also provides evidence for ruralurban income linkages. In countries with a larger industrial base, reduced moisture shrinks the ...

This paper documents a significant impact of climate variation on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily in arid countries. By lowering farm incomes, reduced moisture availability encourages migration to nearby cities, while wetter conditions slow it. The paper also provides evidence for ruralurban linkages. In countries where cities are starting to develop an industrial base, reduced mo...

A brief history of development of the 1985 Hargreaves equation and its comparison to evapotranspiration ~ET! predicted by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations ~FAO! Penman-Monteith method are described to provide background and information helpful in selecting an appropriate reference ET equation under various data situations. Early efforts in irrigation water requiremen...

As climate change is projected to impose profound global variations in the freshwater resources, assessing the impacts of the former on the latter is a fundamental task for improving the water management, namely, in arid and semiarid areas, as there a plenty of in countries like Iran. Such is the objective of the present paper, where the impacts of climate change on the water availability in th...