As of 2010, it is estimated that 10.5 million people live along the trans -national Rio Grande (RGV) with 83% of the population residing in Mexico and several of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. (SandovalSolis et al., 2013). Historically, agricultural irrigation has been the largest water consumer for each country accounting for 86% of total consumption (Sandoval-Solis et al., 2013). Urba...

Increasing water use and droughts, along with climate variability and land use change, have seriously altered vegetation growth patterns and ecosystem response in several regions alongside the Andes Mountains. Thirty years of the new generation biweekly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI3g) time series data show significant land cover specific trends and variability in annual producti...

Over the past few decades, the competition for freshwater resources has substantially increased in arid/semi-arid areas, exacerbating the pressure on the largest user of water, namely agriculture, to consume less water. However, reducing crop consumptive water use or evapotranspiration through water stress can have a negative impact on production economics if not precisely managed. Remote sensi...

Determination of optimal cropping pattern is essential for arid and semiarid regions with deficit water resources. Fars province is located in the southern part of I.R. of Iran with mean annual precipitation from 50 to 1000 mm and in most parts of this province water resources for agriculture are deficit. Jahrom region with semi-arid climate is located in Fars province with mean annual rainfall...

Biological invasion is one of the most threatening factors for biodiversity conservation. Lacking information on alien species in certain regions of the world hampers a balanced understanding of invasion processes and efficient data exchange among stakeholders. Current knowledge gaps are in need of urgent concern. We therefore conducted a review on alien animals in Xinjiang, an unknown region o...

The peri-urban area is the region where there is a more dynamic interaction between the urban and rural. The peri-urban area supplies natural resources, such as land for urban expansion and agricultural products to feed the urban population. In arid and semi-arid lands, such as northern Mexico, these areas may also be the source of water for the city's domestic demand. In addition, scholars arg...

There are pressing concerns about the interplay between agricultural productivity, water demand, and water availability in semi-arid to arid regions of the world. Currently, irrigated agriculture is the dominant water user in these regions and is estimated to consume approximately 80% of the world’s diverted freshwater resources. We develop an improved irrigated land-use mapping algorithm that ...

the effects of different climatic, soil, geometric, and management factors on soil organic carbon (soc) degradation and sequestration potential was evaluated in the semi-arid zone of mereg watershed, west of iran. two nonparametric methods, viz. classification and regression tree (cart) and feed forward back propagation artificial neural network (ann) were compared with parametric multivariate ...