1 Introduction Accurate quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) is one of the most important elements in meteorological and hydrologic analyses. It has been long recognized, however, that rain gauge networks are usually inadequate because of their limited distribution. During the last decades intense scientific efforts have been devoted to utilize remote sensing information for the estimati...

The reconstruction of land use practices in hyper-arid Saharan Africa is often hampered by the accuracy available tools and unconscious biases that see these areas as marginal inhospitable. Considered this has been for a long time living space pastoral mobile communities, new research showing agriculture might have more important than previously thought. In paper, after review present-day strat...

Few studies have investigated the influence of water availability on plant population spatial patterns. We studied changes in the spatial patterns of Caragana stenophylla along a climatic drought gradient within the Inner Mongolian Plateau, China. We examined spatial patterns, seed density, "nurse effects" of shrubs on seedlings, transpiration rates and water use efficiency (WUE) of C. stenophy...

Arid desert ecosystems of the western United States are particularly susceptible to climate change and climate variability. Plants and animals in this region live near their physiological limits for water and temperature stress. Slight changes in temperature or precipitation regimes or a change in the frequency and magnitude of extreme climatic events could therefore substantially alter the com...

BACKGROUND The Atacama Desert is one of the driest deserts in the world and its soil, with extremely low moisture, organic carbon content, and oxidizing conditions, is considered to be at the dry limit for life. RESULTS Analyses of high throughput DNA sequence data revealed that bacterial communities from six geographic locations in the hyper-arid core and along a North-South moisture gradien...

Desert ecosystems spanning moisture conditions from dry grasslands to barren hyper-arid landscapes are the largest terrestrial biome with more than 40% of the terrestrial landmass. Remote sensing data provide an efficient costeffective means to assess biophysical indicators of land degradation and desertification, providing that essential ecosystem properties can be monitored. We review the spe...

The arid region is spread over 38.7 million hectares mainly in the states of Rajasthan. Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh besides cold arid region situated in Leh, Laddakh and Himachal Pradesh. The region is marked by extreme environmental constraints due to which the cultivation of traditional crops is not economical. In a situation such as this, arid horticulture has ample s...

Increasing water use and droughts, along with climate variability and land use change, have seriously altered vegetation growth patterns and ecosystem response in several regions alongside the Andes Mountains. Thirty years of the new generation biweekly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI3g) time series data show significant land cover specific trends and variability in annual producti...

Evapotranspiration is a major loss flux of the water balance in arid and semi-arid areas. The estimation of actual evapotranspiration has significance for hydrological and environmental purposes. The Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) algorithm was applied to estimate actual evapotranspiration in the Qaidam Basin and its eight hydrological sub-regions, Northwest China. There were 3,036 cloud-...