Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) occur across most of the world's drylands and are sensitive indicators of dryland degradation. Accounting for shifts in biocrust composition is important for quantifying integrity of arid and semi-arid ecosystems, but the best methods for assessing biocrusts are uncertain. We investigate the utility of surveying biocrust morphogroups, a reduced set of biotic c...

The movement of human populations across the planet has character ized human societies throughout history. Historically, resource scarcity or depletion has induced this movement. In recent years, rural populations and their relationships to their environment are again attracting growing interest, especially in connection with population change and particularly migration. Rural areas contain mos...

In semiarid drylands water shortage and trampling by large herbivores are two factors limiting plant growth and distribution. Trampling can strongly affect plant performance, but little is known about responses of morphological and mechanical traits of woody plants to trampling and their possible interaction with water availability. Seedlings of four shrubs (Caragana intermedia, Cynanchum komar...

Drylands represent about 41% of Earth’s land area, host more than 1,500 tree species and support 20% the world’s human population. Trees are key to functioning numerous dryland ecosystems contribute goods services for many local communities, but threatened by global changes. From this perspective, mapping assemblages drylands can provide valuable information conservation. To our knowledge, warm...

Salinity is a major threat for the sustainability of irrigated agriculture in drylands [...]

As the world's population increases, marginal lands such as drylands are likely to become more important for food production. One proven strategy for improving crop production in drylands involves shifting from conventional tillage to no-till to increase water use efficiency, especially when this shift is coupled with more intensive crop rotations. Practices such as no-till that reduce soil dis...

Winter soil respiration (Rs) is becoming a significant component of annual carbon budgets with more warming in winter than summer. However, little is known about the controlling mechanisms of winter Rs in dryland. We made continuous measurements of Rs in four microsites (non-crust (BS), lichen (LC), moss (MC), and a mixture of moss and lichen (ML)) in a desert shrub-land ecosystem northern Chin...

Dew is an important source of water in drylands, particularly for biological soil crusts (BSCs), which are soil communities dominated by lichens, mosses and cyanobacteria that are prevalent in these environments and play important roles in nutrient cycling. While BSCs can retain and use water from dew, the effects of dew events on the cycling of nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) in BSC-dominated ecos...

Facilitation is a major force shaping the structure and diversity of plant communities in terrestrial ecosystems. Detecting positive plant-plant interactions relies on the combination of field experimentation and the demonstration of spatial association between neighboring plants. This has often restricted the study of facilitation to particular sites, limiting the development of systematic ass...

In order to obtain an optimum management of natural resources, determination of variables that control plant presence and distribution is needed. In the present research, the relationship between some character plants of drylands and some soil and environmental variables were investigated. After primary survey and selection of main plant species, sampling was done in each vegetation type within...