Pollen data from 30 sites in arid and semi-arid regions of China were reviewed to document regional patterns of Holocene vegetation and climate change and to understand the large-scale controls on these changes. Vegetation at most sites in eastern Inner Mongolia switched between forest, forest steppe, and typical steppe, showing maximum moisture conditions before 6 ka (1 ka 1⁄4 1000 cal yr BP) ...

Soil moisture is a key limiting resource in arid and semi-arid environments for woody shrub species. We assessed if three arid communities differed in their level of dry season soil moisture content and if the dominant species in these communities differed in their ability to use soil moisture. Water potential of all of the dominant woody plant species occurring in chaparral, coastal sage, and ...

[1] We measured soil nitrogen (N) cycling and fluxes of N2O and NO in three land-use types across the metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona. Urbanization increased N2O emissions compared to native landscapes, primarily due to the expansion of fertilized and irrigated lawns. Fluxes of N2O from lawns ranged from 18 to 80 mg N m!2 h!1 and were significantly larger than managed xeric landscapes (2....

introduction dominant process in arid and semi-arid region is dynamic of wind that carries the sand and caused damage to several facilities and human settlements. there are many human settlements with low population and mostly small and scattered in different parts of foothills of dasht-e lut (lut desert), especially in mountainous margins of alluvial fans. residential and cultivation area of t...

The rapid expansion of deserts in recent decades as a result of human actions combined with climatic changes has highlighted the necessity to understand biological processes in arid environments. Whereas physical processes and the biology of flora and fauna have been relatively well studied in marginally used arid areas, knowledge of desert soil micro-organisms remains fragmentary. The objectiv...

The hyper-arid core of the Atacama Desert (Chile) is the driest place on Earth and is considered a close analogue to the extremely arid conditions on the surface of Mars. Microbial life is very rare in soils of this hyper-arid region, and autotrophic micro-organisms are virtually absent. Instead, photosynthetic micro-organisms have successfully colonized the interior of halite crusts, which are...

1 Department of Arid Land Agriculture, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2 Desert Agriculture Initiative, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, 3 Agriculture Genetic Engineering Research Institute, Agriculture Research Center, Giza, Egypt, 4 Department of Soil and Environmental Science, Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan, ...

Dasht-e Lut (Lut Desert) is archaeologically well-known in Near East thanks to the presence, on its western edge, of the Bronze Age urban centre of Shahdad. In 2012, the author launched a three-season field project in the area of Shahdad, with an agenda articulated around three main research points: an extensive archaeological survey along the western edge of the Lut Desert, the stratigraphic e...

abstract this paper presents a robust approach using artificial neural networks in the form of a self organizing map (som) as a semi-automatic method for analysis and identification of morphometric features in two completely different environments, the man and biosphere reserve “eastern carpathians” (central europe) in a complex mountainous humid area and yardangs in lut desert, iran, a hyper a...

Dust storms and sandy dust events originating in arid and semi-arid areas can transport particulate material, pollutants, and potential transport long distances from their sources. Exposure to desert dust particles is generally acknowledged to endanger human health. However, most studies have examined anthropogenic particulate sources, with few studies considering contributions from natural des...