Natural scrublands in semi-arid deserts are increasingly being converted into fields. This results in losses of characteristic flora and fauna, and may also affect microbial diversity. In the present study, the long-term effect (50 years) of such a transition on soil bacterial communities was explored at two sites typical of semi-arid deserts. Comparisons were made between soil samples from alf...

Reclamation of abandoned farmland is crucial to a sustainable agriculture in arid regions. This study aims to evaluate the impact of different reclamation treatments on abandoned salinized farmland. We investigated four artificial reclamation treatments, continuous cotton (CC), continuous alfalfa (CA), tree-wheat intercropping (TW) and trees (TS), which were conducted in 2011–2012 in the Manasi...

Although dry farming is important in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Khorasan, as well as some other districts, a large proportion of Iran’s agriculture has always depended upon irrigation. Approximately half the annual grain crop, and an overwhelming proportion of other crops, are irrigated. With the exception of the Caspian littoral almost the whole of Iran is classified as semi-arid or arid. As i...

today, shortage of fresh water especially in arid and semi-arid regions has caused several difficulties.  whatever more than 70 percent of the earth is water, but also high salinity of water resources, caused serious restrictions for human to use these resources. therefore, desalination has attracted all attentions more than any time. between different water consumers in the country, agricultur...

Conservation tillage has been promoted as a solution to counteract constraints caused by intensive agriculture. In this work the effects of two conservation tillage systems, reduced tillage (RT) and no-tillage (NT) were compared to the traditional tillage (TT) in a long(15 years, RT) and short-term experiment (3 years, NT). Both experiments were carried out under semi-arid, rainfed agriculture ...

Agricultural intensification has increased crop yields, but at high economic and environmental cost. Harnessing ecosystem services of naturally occurring organisms is a cheaper but under-appreciated approach, because the functional roles of organisms are not linked to crop yields, especially outside the northern temperate zone. Ecosystem services in soil come from earthworms in these cooler and...

This paper documents a significant impact of climate variation on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily in arid countries. By lowering farm incomes, reduced moisture availability encourages migration to nearby cities, while wetter conditions slow it. The paper also provides evidence for ruralurban income linkages. In countries with a larger industrial base, reduced moisture shrinks the ...