A population of 216 specimens of Stenocereus eichlamii (Cactaceae, Subfamily Cereoideae) was surveyed for Triatoma ryckmani (vector of Chagas disease) in a one hectare plot of semiarid habitat in Guatemala. Out of 44 plants that had dead and dry sections, 24 plants had a total of 103 specimens of T. ryckmani. In comparison with other areas of Guatemala, T ryckmani is well established in the sem...

Groundwater recharge is essential to groundwater resources availability to economy and society development in semiarid areas. Chloride mass balance method to assess groundwater recharge have been review and was employed to quantify groundwater recharge in North Okanagan which is a semiarid mountainous terrain, southern interior British Columbian, Canada. Chloride concentration in precipitation ...

In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using the C-band European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-1) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to estimate surface soil roughness in a semiarid rangeland. Radar backscattering coefficients were extracted from a dry and a wet season SAR image and were compared with 47 in situ soil roughness measurements obtained in the rocky soils of the Walnut G...

Records of the gastropod Melanoides tuberculatus (Müller, 1774), family Thiaridae, in the Piranhas-Assu River basin in Rio Grande do Norte reveal the dispersal of this native Southeast Asian and East African species into aquatic environments of the Brazilian semiarid region, including artificial environments (reservoirs) and lotic systems. The eutrophic conditions of the local waterbodies appea...

Increased atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition and altered precipitation regimes have profound impacts on ecosystem functioning in semiarid grasslands. The interactions between those two factors remain largely unknown. A field experiment with N and water additions was conducted in a semiarid grassland in northern China. We examined the responses of aboveground net primary production (ANPP) and p...

Variability in seasonal soil moisture (SM) and temperature (T) can alter ecosystem/atmosphere exchange of the trace gases carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O), and methane (CH4). This study reports the impact of year-round SM status on trace gas fluxes in three semiarid vegetation zones, mesquite (30 g organic C kg soil), open/ forb (6 g organic C kg soil), and sacaton (18 g organic C kg s...