The Asian summer monsoon affects more than sixty percent of the world's population; understanding its controlling factors is becoming increasingly important due to the expanding human influence on the environment and climate and the need to adapt to global climate change. Various mechanisms have been suggested; however, an overarching paradigm delineating the dominant factors for its generation...

archaeological excavations on the western part of the central iranian plateau, known as the qazvin plain provides invaluable information about the sedentary communities from early occupation to the later prehistoric era. despite the past archeological data, chronological studies mostly rely on the relative use of the bayesian modeling for stratigraphically-related radiocarbon dates. the current...

we collected 60 adult males and 85 adult females of trapelus lessonae de filippi, 1863 in early may 2008 from central iranian plateau to study sexual dimorphism in morphological traits as well as female reproductive traits. size-related sexual dimorphism occurred in all the compared body dimensions. the largest female was 83.88 mm in snout-vent length, and the largest male was 73.12 mm. as well...

the northwest iran comprises parts of two major biodiversity hotspots; irano-anatoli and caucasus. it is a mountainous transition realm between caucasus forest in the north, pontic forest of turkey in the west and central deserts of iranian plateau. this study was designed to determine rodent diversity in northwest iran. moreover, corridor and barrier features of the region were investigated, a...

Lightning flash activities on the central Tibetan Plateau have been studied by using the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) database from 1998 to 2002. The lightning activity shows a clear diurnal variation on the central Plateau. The lightning discharge is weaker on the Plateau than in other low-altitude continental regions because of the lower convective available poential energy (CAPE) on the Pl...

recently, some specimens of genus apodemus were found from shirkooh mountains of central plateau of iran. in order to certify morphologic and morphometric studies, a study has been carried out on the genome of these specimens using random amplified polymorphism dna (rapd) marker. nine random primers were used. the analysis of data determines the separation of avicenna's wood mice as a new speci...

we usewe use ml shear wave velocity to derive a high resolution 2d ml shear wave velocity map for the iranian plateau. the ml amplitudes and arrival times are routinely measured for the calculation of local magnitude. ml shear wave velocity is very sensitive to the lateral change of crustal thickness and switches between the velocity of lg and sn waves. an lg wave will die out as soon as encoun...