The authors reconstructed May–September precipitation over the Asian continent (58–558N, 608–1358E) back to AD 1470 on the basis of tree-ring data, historical documentary records, ice core records, and the few long-term instrumental data series available in the region. They employed the method of Regularized Expectation Maximization (RegEM) and applied it to 44 subregions within the continent. ...

Snare use in the arid Desert West of North America is characteristic of a broad-spectrum subsistence strategy, a conclusion supported by the contextual occurrence of snare bundles. Such a system insured against economic crises by including a wide range of plants and animals on its list of food items. It is suggested that microfauna, which are often relegated to the "also present" category of ar...

Shallow-rooted grasses and deep-rooted shrubs dominate arid ecosystems where nitrogen is concentrated in the upper layers of the soil and water is distributed throughout. Analysis of mineral nitrogen and absorption patterns using a tracer indicated that shrubs in Patagonia absorbed nutrients from the lower, relatively nutrient-poor layers of the soil. Are they, consequently, at a competitive di...

Electromagnetic induction (EM) is a useful mean of assessing soil salinity in large areas, particularly after its calibration on different soils. Electromagnetic induction was used to monitor spatial and temporal changes of soil salinity within the saline irrigation district of Flumen, Spain. Soil salinity patterns in this region are entangled because of intensive land leveling and irrigation. ...

Evapotranspiration (ET) plays an important role in the hydrological cycle and it is essential to estimate ET accurately for the evaluation of available water resources in arid regions. In this paper, the monthly change of ET in the semi-arid Hailiutu River basin in northwest China were studied. The spatial distribution of ET was assessed by using the energy balance approach SEBS (Surface Energy...

Fresh water is an essential element for human survival and land-based life forms. Right quantity and quality of fresh water is a fundamental element for human continued existence and land-based life forms. About 97% of earth water is salt water and from remaining 3% only 0.4% fresh water is available for human use. Many countries of the world are facing problem of inadequate drinking water supp...

Terrestrial vegetation dynamics are closely influenced by both climate and by both climate and by land use and/or land cover change (LULCC) caused by human activities. Both can change over time in a monotonic way and it can be difficult to separate the effects of climate change from LULCC on vegetation. Here we attempt to attribute trends in the fractional green vegetation cover to climate vari...

BACKGROUND The Atacama Desert is one of the driest deserts in the world and its soil, with extremely low moisture, organic carbon content, and oxidizing conditions, is considered to be at the dry limit for life. RESULTS Analyses of high throughput DNA sequence data revealed that bacterial communities from six geographic locations in the hyper-arid core and along a North-South moisture gradien...

Arid grasslands are used worldwide for grazing by domestic livestock, generating debate about how this pastoral enterprise may influence native desert biota. One approach to resolving this question is to experimentally reduce livestock numbers and measure the effects. However, a key challenge in doing this is that historical grazing impacts are likely to be cumulative and may therefore confound...

Animal species are seldom distributed evenly at either local or larger spatial scales, and instead tend to aggregate in sites that meet their resource requirements and maximise fitness. This tendency is likely to be especially marked in arid regions where species could be expected to concentrate at resource-rich oases. In this study, we first test the hypothesis that productive riparian sites i...