Showing papers in "Journal of Arid Environments in 2010"

TL;DR: The extent and magnitude of rangeland degradation on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP) remains largely unknown because monitoring programs have been subjective and poorly documented as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors assessed the effects of large-scale afforestation on combating desertification and controlling dust storms in China and concluded that the importance of this afforestation program seems to have been overstated.

TL;DR: Since the plants subjected to mild water and salt stresses showed a rapid and almost complete recovery, these physiological alterations could represent a set of adaptive mechanisms employed by J. curcas to cope with these stressful conditions.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a method for the management of tropical forests in the context of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and the Belgium Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFR).

TL;DR: In this article, visible-near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (VNIR) was evaluated for prediction of diverse soil properties related to four different soil series of the Entisol soil group within a single field in northern Turkey.

TL;DR: A review of palaeoenvironmental data for southeastern Spain, a landscape vulnerable to desertification and with antiquity of human pressure on the landscape is presented in this article, where a xerophytic component is discernible in the pollen diagrams of the southeastern peninsula ever since the Middle Miocene.

TL;DR: The nonparametric Mann-Kendall test was used to detect the trends of major hydroclimatic variables in the Tarim River Basin, the largest inland river basin in China for the period of 1960-2007.

TL;DR: In this paper, a small village in northern Burkina Faso was analyzed to understand the impact of climate variability on rural life in the Sahel region of the country, and the authors found that the majority of the villagers there are "beyond climate" as their current livelihood strategies are increasingly climate independent.

TL;DR: The result showed that herbaceous biomass was higher in enclosures than in the open grazed areas, and grazing areas were less threatened by invasive species than enclosures.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used both the Weighted Linear Combination and the Boolean techniques within GIS environment to select suitable areas in Northern Jordan for establishing water harvesting ponds, which resulted in having ca. 25% of the study area (64,184.8

TL;DR: In this paper, a quantitative method was developed to assess the relative roles of climate change and human activities in desertification by selecting NPP as an indicator, and the potential NPP and the difference between the potential and actual NPP were used to represent the impacts of climate and human factors on desertification.

TL;DR: The presence of these RAF in several grass species, over several years, and at several sites suggests that grasses in semiarid landscapes share a similar cohort of fungal dominants.

TL;DR: The results suggest that flowering phenology may be changing faster and precipitation may play a more important role in semi-arid grasslands than in humid-temperate systems.

TL;DR: Despite the intense drought, the large root system provided a basis for quick recovery of AGP to pre-drought levels without a shift to a drier equilibrium community, suggesting that the response time scales differed among species.

TL;DR: In this paper, the performance of three empirical methods for estimating reference evapotranspiration (ET0): Makkink (Mak), Priestley-Taylor (PT) and Hargreaves-Samani (HARG) were assessed in semi-and regions.

TL;DR: A 0.6m-long horizontal core from a stalagmite in the entrance area of Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, a National Heritage Site, has provided a 35-ka record of environmental change as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, a study was conducted to understand how seasonality in drylands influences the space-time dynamics of cattle behavior and mobility among pastoralist managed Zebu cattle.

TL;DR: In this article, the change in precipitation from 1900 to 2006 on a regional scale over a portion of the Central United States was examined, showing many areas of increasing wetness throughout the area, with drying in isolated regions of the West and North.

TL;DR: In this paper, a strong correlation was found between spectral indexes and AGB in the early dry season (fall -May 12, 2002) while poorer results were obtained for summer and winter.

TL;DR: Nineteen woody species growing in the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil were examined and the six species that initiated vegetative and/or reproductive phenophases during the dry season had low wood densities, inversely related to the quantity of water stored at saturation.

TL;DR: Deficits of cool-season precipitation were more extreme than warm-season deficits and were probably the greatest contributor to plant mortality, indicating the importance of the cumulative effect of successive drought years.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used time-lapse repeat digital photography (pheno-cams) to investigate the hydrological triggers of vegetation response in semiarid shrublands.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the influence of seasonal climate and phenology on soil evaporation in North American monsoon regions with respect to a gradient of mesquite cover (Prosopis velutina).

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the efficiency of MODIS fire products to account for the variability of fire regimes in relation to changes in land cover and savanna vegetation in West African savannas.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors measured the mean annual rainfall and temperature of Socotra, measured in a network of meteorological stations from 2002 to 06, were 216 mm and 28.9 °C.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present radiocarbon dates, infrared stimulated luminescence ages and chronology of material culture to show that desert kites in this region were established in the late 4th-early 3rd millennia BC and ceased to function by the mid-2nd millennium BC.

TL;DR: While a considerable diversity of fungi is present within these BSCs, much higher than what has previously been determined for cyanobacteria-dominated crusts, fungi contribute less biomass and are less diverse than their bacterial counterparts.

TL;DR: In this article, the impact of enclosure age and enclosure management on the vegetation composition in the Njemps Flats range unit, Lake Baringo Basin (Kenya) was assessed.

TL;DR: The termite assemblages of three sites of Caatinga under different levels of anthropogenic disturbance in the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil were sampled using 65 × 2 m transects, with a conspicuous reduction in both diversity and abundance with increased disturbance.

TL;DR: Li et al. as discussed by the authors found that biological soil crusts may affect soil evaporation rates and consequently relieve or aggravate the shortage of soil water in arid and semi-arid regions.