Dryland ecosystems cover 40% of the total land surface on Earth and are defined broadly as zones where precipitation is considerably less than the potential evapotranspiration. Nonrainfall waters (for example, fog and dew) are the least-studied and least-characterized components of the hydrological cycle, although they supply critical amounts of water for dryland ecosystems. The sources of nonr...

Vegetation in dryland ecosystems often forms remarkable spatial patterns. These range from regular bands of vegetation alternating with bare ground, to vegetated spots and labyrinths, to regular gaps of bare ground within an otherwise continuous expanse of vegetation. It has been suggested that spotted vegetation patterns could indicate that collapse into a bare ground state is imminent, and th...

Background: Companioned by economic development, a dietary shift toward higher meat consumption is seen in developing countries and transitional economies, where the demand for livestock production has been increasing in response to such a dietary shift. In the Asian Dryland Belt, approaches to meet this demand have focused on grazing intensification, cropland conversion for animal feed, and su...

In the state of Sinaloa, rainfall presents considerable irregularities, and climate is mainly semiarid, which highlights importance studying sensitivity various indices meteorological drought. The goal to evaluate four drought from five weather stations in Sinaloa for prediction rainfed maize yield. Using DrinC software data period 1982–2013, following were calculated: standardized precipitatio...

Post-anthesis drought stress is the most important problem affecting wheat production in dryland fields, specially in Mediterranean regions. The main objective of this research was to evaluate drought tolerance indices in dryland wheat genotypes under post-anthesis drought stress. The research was including two different experiments. In each experiment, twenty dryland bread wheat genotypes were...

To investigate the response of rainfed maize to sowing methods and NPK levels, an experiment was undertaken during kharif of 2011 and 2012 at Dryland (Kerawa) Agriculture Research Station, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Budgam. The experiment was laid out in a randomized block design with combination of 2 sowing methods (flat sowing, 75 cm apart ro...

In this millennium, global drylands face a myriad of problems that present tough research, management, and policy challenges. Recent advances in dryland development, however, together with the integrative approaches of global change and sustainability science, suggest that concerns about land degradation, poverty, safeguarding biodiversity, and protecting the culture of 2.5 billion people can b...

The main objective of this study is to present an improved modeling technique called Vegetation ET (VegET) that integrates commonly used water balance algorithms with remotely sensed Land Surface Phenology (LSP) parameter to conduct operational vegetation water balance modeling of rainfed systems at the LSP’s spatial scale using readily available global data sets. Evaluation of the VegET model ...

Temporal NDVI signatures of the following land cover types in the Aral Sea Basin (ASB) were analyzed in MODIS data 2000–2012: Wetlands, bare land, water surfaces, natural vegetation and rainfed agriculture (in mountainous regions), low vegetation, rice cropping systems. Only the last class refers to cropland. All other classes were targeted to separate non-cropland or rainfed agriculture from t...

Hydrology) Spatial Patterns in Dryland Vegetation and the Significance of Dispersal, Infiltration and Complex Topography