Abstract Desertification is one of the fundamental problems that threaten many arid and semi-arid areas. The formulation of the United Nation Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), adopted in Paris, 1994 and ratified in 1996, with the active participation of Egypt, gave emphasis on combating the major threats to sustainability of dry lands. Recently, different models were developed to fo...

Water managers need map of irrigated areas (defined as the identification of their location and their areal extent) to plan a rational use of water under limited availability and to prevent the unauthorized withdrawals. Many authors have shown that the Earth Observation techniques are an effective tool for mapping irrigated areas worldwide at different spatial scales (global/regional/and local)...

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data have been widely applied for the remote sensing of aerosol optical depth (AOD) because the MODIS sensor features a short revisit period and a moderate spatial resolution. The Dense Dark Vegetation (DDV) method is the most popular retrieval method. However, the DDV method can only be used to retrieve the AOD with high precision when the ...

Despite recent studies on bio-fuels for carbon mitigation, biomass resource shortages in Japan continue to be a serious concern. To deal with this future problem, we evaluated whether the large amounts of biomass supplied from arid land afforestation in Western Australia could compensate for this biomass resource shortage, by estimating how much biomass as bio-fuel resource could be produced by...

The lack of new antibiotics in the pharmaceutical pipeline guides more and more researchers to leave the classical isolation procedures and to look in special niches and ecosystems. Bioprospecting of extremophilic Actinobacteria through mining untapped strains and avoiding resiolation of known biomolecules is among the most promising strategies for this purpose. With this approach, members of a...

This study presents preliminary results of the validation of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) daily LST products (MOD/MYD11A1, Version 5) using longwave radiation ground measurements obtained at 12 stations in the North Arid and Semi-Arid Area Cooperative Experimental Observation Integrated Research program. In this evaluation process, the broadband emissivity at each s...