Water scarcity constrains the livelihoods of millions of people in tropical drylands. Tree planting in these environments is generally discouraged due to the large water consumption by trees, but this view may neglect their potential positive impacts on water availability. The effect of trees on soil hydraulic properties linked to groundwater recharge is poorly understood. In this study, we per...

In drylands, both dust storms and ephemeral salt lakes (playas) are common. Observations using remote sensing and ground studies have shown that these playas can be major sources of saline dust storms. Some basins have recently become desiccated as a result of water abstraction by humans, and these have become significant sources of dust. The timing and amounts of dust emissions depends on such...

Areas affected by land degradation in Sub-Saharan West Africa between 1982 and 2012 are identified using time-series analysis of vegetation index data derived from satellites. The residual trend (RESTREND) of a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series is defined as the fraction of the difference between the observed NDVI and the NDVI predicted from climate data. It has been wid...

− The identification of irrigated cropland is essential for crop monitoring, yield estimation and water management assessment in drylands. The standard approach is to use supervised classification on multispectral bands, vegetation indices or the Principal Components or, more recently, the combination of optical images with radar data. More complex methods, such as time-series analysis, sub-pix...

This paper synthesizes lessons learnt from research that aimed to identify land in the dryland regions of eight sub-Saharan African study countries where bioenergy feedstocks production has a low risk of detrimental environmental and socio-economic effects. The methodology involved using geographical information systems (GISs) to interrogate a wide range of datasets, aerial photograph and field...

1. After near-extirpation in the early 20th century, beaver populations are increasing throughout many parts of North America. Simultaneously, there is an emerging interest in employing beaver activity for stream restoration in arid and semi-arid environments (collectively, ‘drylands’), where streams and adjacent riparian ecosystems are expected to face heightened challenges from climate change...

Cropland abandonment is globally widespread and has strong repercussions for regional food security and the environment. Statistics suggest that one of the hotspots of abandoned cropland is located in the drylands of the Aral Sea Basin (ASB), which covers parts of post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. To date, the exact spatial and temporal extents of abandoned cropland remain unclear...

Groundwater storage (GS) is the major water resource for vegetation in drylands. Thus, positive relationships between vegetative growth condition (VGC) and GS are expected Since mining-induced dewatering tends to deplete surrounding mine sites, VGC should become less favorable due a shortage of accessible water. However, quantitative analysis repealed opposite. We found that global annual miner...