Archaeological evidence from dry cave deposits in the northern Chihuahuan Desert reveal intensive utilisation of desert plants that store prebiotic inulin-type fructans as the primary carbohydrate. In this semi-arid region limited rainfall and poor soil conditions prevented the adoption of agriculture and thus provides a unique glimpse into a pure hunter-forager economy spanning over 10 000 yea...

 SIR-C quad-pol MLC data acquired in 1994 and ALOS PALSAR quad-pol and dual pol SLC data acquired in 2006 and 2007 over several Indian sites have been processed using PolSARpro software for classification of various land features. The land features include ocean, clear water, settlements, agriculture fields, arid lands, grown and young forest, hilly terrain, mangrove forest, etc. Both unsuperv...

Drought stress is the major problem in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Investigating the response of different cultivars of crop plants to drought stress can help to select the tolerant ones for agriculture in arid lands. In this study, a greenhouse experiment was conducted as a factorial experiment based on completely randomized design with two common bean cultivars (Phaseolus vulgari...

1. Definitions 1.1. Types of Aridity 1.2. Levels of Aridity 2. Paleoperspective 3. People and Land Use in Arid Lands 3.1. Foragers/Hunter–gatherers 3.2. Agriculturists 3.3. Pastoralists 4. Geomorphology of Arid and Semiarid Lands 5. Biological Diversity in Arid Lands 5.1. Arid and Semiarid Lands Plants and their Uses 5.2. The Future of the Conservation of Wild Plants in Arid Regions 6. Climatic...

Article history: One difficulty with reconst Received 16 February 2008 Received in revised form 24 August 2008 Accepted 1 September 2008

Transgenic cottons producing Cry toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) provide for control of lepidopteran pests and were first commercially grown in Australia, Mexico and the USA in 1996. As of 2007, a total of six additional countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, and South Africa) now grow Bt cotton on a total production area of 14 million hectares. The technology primarily p...

Plant can alter reproductive strategies for adaptation to different environments. However, alterations in flowering strategies and sexual allocation for the same species growing in different environments still remain unclear. We examined the sexual reproduction parameters of Caragana stenophylla across four climatic zones from semi-arid, arid, very arid, to intensively arid zones in the Inner M...