Societies in semi-arid areas in developing regions are amongst those, most vulnerable to climate variability and potentially most vulnerable to climate change. The vulnerability to climate variability is caused by the strong restrictions that limited water availability poses on the use of natural resources, by the generally low reliability of water availability and, on the other hand, an often ...

A large reservoir of bioavailable nitrogen (up to approximately 10(4) kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, as nitrate) has been previously overlooked in studies of global nitrogen distribution. The reservoir has been accumulating in subsoil zones of arid regions throughout the Holocene. Consideration of the subsoil reservoir raises estimates of vadose-zone nitrogen inventories by 14 to 71% for wa...

................................................................................................................................................... ii Preface...................................................................................................................................................... 1 Background ..............................................................................

There exists a general consensus that future climate change has the potential to severely impact fragile regions on the planet, especially the semi-arid to arid zones [1]. If adaptation strategies are absent and institutions are not in place for mitigation, economies will suffer and intraand interstate conflicts over the allocation of scarce resources will potentially ensue. These developments,...

desertification is the consequence of series of processes in which climate change and human activities are more important factors than others. arid and semi-arid areas have occupied most parts of iran. sistan region is one of arid areas of iran where wind erosion is an important factor of land degradation and soil deterioration. for classification of desertification intensity, several methods h...

Native biodiversity on the Galapagos Archipelago is severely threatened by invasive alien species. On Santa Cruz Island, the abundance of introduced plant species is low in the arid lowlands of the Galapagos National Park, but increases with elevation into unprotected humid highlands. Two common alien plant species, guava (Psidium guajava) and passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) occur at higher e...

Longer, drier summers projected for arid and semi-arid regions of western North America under climate change are likely to have enormous consequences for water resources and river-dependent ecosystems. Many climate change scenarios for this region involve decreases in mean annual streamflow, latesummer precipitation and late-summer streamflow in the coming decades. Intermittent streams are alre...

Based on the data from China’s second national soil survey and field observations in northwest China, we estimated soil organic carbon (SOC) storage in China and investigated its spatial and vertical distribution. China’s SOC storage in a depth of 1 meter was estimated as 69.1 Pg (10 g), with an average density of 7.8 kg m. About 48% of the storage was concentrated in the top 30 cm. The SOC den...

Our objective was to determine if long-term increases in precipitation can maintain grasslands susceptible to desertification, and initiate a reversal of historic regime shifts on desertified shrublands. Perennial grass production and species richness in a multi-year wet period were hypothesized to be greater than expected based on precipitation in a sequence of dry years. These responses were ...

The authors reconstructed May–September precipitation over the Asian continent (58–558N, 608–1358E) back to AD 1470 on the basis of tree-ring data, historical documentary records, ice core records, and the few long-term instrumental data series available in the region. They employed the method of Regularized Expectation Maximization (RegEM) and applied it to 44 subregions within the continent. ...