A New Dryland Development Paradigm Grounded in Empirical Analysis of Dryland Systems Science

Global desertification: building a science for dryland development.

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...

Beyond desertification: new paradigms for dryland landscapes

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America C to existing paradigms – the set of practices or universally recognized achievements or perspectives that define a scientific discipline at any particular period of time – are fundamental to the progress of scientific knowledge (Kuhn 1962). While these challenges have always been part of science, the frequency and number of success...

A morphometric analysis of vegetation patterns in dryland ecosystems

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...

Dryland Agriculture: Sociology

The potential role of sheep in dryland grain production systems

In dryland farming areas of Montana, annual precipitation is not sufficient for annual planting of cereal grains. Instead, a crop-summer fallow farming system is used to conserve soil moisture and increase available nitrogen for subsequent crop growth. Managing this summer fallow, either by mechanical means or with herbicides, is the highest variable cost associated with dryland grain productio...