Biological soil crusts are key mediators of carbon and nitrogen inputs for arid land soils and often represent a dominant portion of the soil surface cover in arid lands. Free-living soil nematode communities reflect their environment and have been used as biological indicators of soil condition. In this study, we test the hypothesis that nematode communities are successionally more mature bene...

The present study examines empirically the relationship betuieen sex and internal-external expectancy. It also studies the differences in the level of performance between internally and externally oriented male and female library employees. The results of inter-correlation suggest sex as a significant correlate of locus of control. Bivariate analysis reveals significant difference in the level ...

6 Agricultural sustainability practices make the best use 7 of both nature’s resources and available technology, 8 and generally avoid those land use practices that lead 9 to greater environmental stress. There are examples in 10 some agro-ecosystems, however, where stress is vital 11 to food quality and productivity. In the case of grape 12 production, a limited amount of environmental stress ...

Estimating actual crop water requirement and irrigation schedule are essential for designing of the irrigation systems, storage construction and water conveyance structures. Many models have developed for estimating crop water requirement. Although most of these methods need different climatic parameters, providing and forecasting all of these parameters always are not available. Most of the ti...

Land degradation is a major threat to the sustainability of human habitation, and it is essential to assess it quantitatively. Assessment of the human-induced aspect is especially important for planning appropriate prevention measures. This paper used the Three-North Shelter Forest Program region as the study area, and assessed the land degradation dynamic using a time series of summed normaliz...

In arid and semi-arid environments, the characterization of the inter-annual variations of the light use efficiency ε due to water stress still relies mostly on meteorological data. Thus the GPP estimation based on procedures exclusively driven by remote sensing data has not found yet a widespread use. In this work, the potential to characterize the water stress in semi-natural vegetation of th...

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 ...

The study focused on the seepage of uranium from unlined tailing dams into the alluvial aquifer in the Gawib River floodplain in Namibia where the region solely relies on groundwater for its economic activities as a result of arid climatic condition. The study reviewed previous works besides water sample collection and analyses for major ions, metals and environmental isotopes in addition to fi...

Adaptation to edaphic stress may have a key role in plant species range expansion. Aegilops tauschii Coss., the common wheat's D-genome progenitor native to the Transcaucasus-Middle East region, is a good model to study the relationships between soil salinity and plant distributions: one of its intraspecific sublineages, TauL1b, drove the long-distance eastward expansion of this species range r...

Understanding how environmental parameters interact to govern species distributions is a shared goal of ecology and biogeography. Biotic and abiotic conditions can change distributions by affecting the nature of interspecific interactions. Although documented in free-living systems, this context dependency has been neglected in parasite interactions. We investigated the influence of condition-s...