pedogenesis and clay mineralogy of soils and rock samples were studied in a transect of calcareous, gypsiferous, saline soils and sediments of bakhtegan lake bank in southern iran. the main objectives of study were to determine the occurrence of clay minerals and factors controlling their distribution pattern and relative abundance in soils and parent materials. the soil parent material is high...

In freshwater ecosystems, species compositions are known to be determined hierarchically by large to small‑scale environmental factors, based on the biological traits of the organisms. However, in ephemeral habitats this heuristic framework remains largely untested. Although temporary wetland faunas are constrained by a local filter (i.e., desiccation), we propose its magnitude may still depend...

Acid drainage (AD) has been recognized as one of the major problems facing the Australian mining industry. Much of Australia has a semi-arid to arid climate and is sparsely populated. The impact of AD is therefore less here than in many other countries. Nevertheless, community and shareholder expectations, and the globalization of Australian mining company activities, have ensured the industry ...

Present-day climate cannot account for the presence of such lakes in the arid to semi arid area of Jordan. Therefore more intense and wetter Mediterranean cyclones in winter coupled with Arabian monsoon or even ArabianIndian monsoon in summer would have affected major parts of Jordan up to latitude 31° 32 ́ during the warmer periods of the Pleistocene and brought more rain to establish and susta...

Societies in semi-arid areas in developing regions are amongst those most vulnerable to climate variability and potentially most vulnerable to climate change. The vulnerability to climate variability emerges from a combination of the level of availability of natural resources and the human dependency on these resources. In semi-arid regions, the limited availability of water and the low reliabi...

in this research, the groundwater quality of hoz–e–soltan lake and its catchment was studied for drinking, domestic and irrigation uses according to different parameters. this lake with 195 km2 catchment area is located 85 km of southwest of tehran–qom highway. in order to investigate groundwater quality characteristics in the study area, 34 data from water of well belong to 2008 selected to pr...

Global climate underwent a major reorganization when the Antarctic ice sheet expanded ~14 million years ago (Ma) (1). This event affected global atmospheric circulation, including the strength and position of the westerlies and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and, therefore, precipitation patterns (2-5). We present new shallow-marine sediment records from the continental shelf of Aus...

Ecological processes in arid lands are often described by the pulse-reserve paradigm, in which rain events drive biological activity until moisture is depleted, leaving a reserve. This paradigm is frequently applied to processes stimulated by one or a fewprecipitation eventswithin a growing season.Here we expand the original framework in time and space and include other pulses that interact wit...

Dry Land Asia is the largest arid and semi-arid region in the northern hemisphere that suffers from land desertification. Over the period 1982–2011, there were both overall improvement and regional degeneration in the vegetation NDVI. We analyze future climate changes in these area using two ensemble-average methods from CMIP5 data. Bayesian Model Averaging shows a better capability to represen...