Directional climate change and potential reversal of desertification in arid and semiarid ecosystems

Directional climate change and potential reversal of desertification in arid and semiarid ecosystems

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 ...

Extreme climatic events shape arid and semiarid ecosystems

tally a climatic and oceanographic phenomenon, but it has profound effects on terrestrial ecosystems as well. Although the ecological effects of ENSO are becoming increasingly known from a wide range of terrestrial ecosystems (Holmgren et al. 2001; Wright 2005), their impacts have been most intensively studied in arid and semiarid systems. Because inter-annual variability in precipitation is su...

Desertification and climate change—the Australian perspective

In Australia, desertification tends to be associated with land degradation in the rangelands. It results from unsustainable land use and the impact of European settlement, rather than changing climate. Desertification can, however, be exacerbated or triggered by climate variability. Some of the degradation occurred in the early stages of pastoral development but the problem has continued. The e...

Desertification-Climate Change Interactions – Mexico's Battle Against Desertification

Impacts of climate change on extreme precipitation events in arid (Bandar Abbas) and semi-arid (Shahrekord) stations in Iran

The aim of this paper is to project extreme precipitation events in an arid and a semiarid station. In order to project climate change based on general circulation models (GCMs), we have applied LARS-WG[1] downscaling tool. This stochastic weather generator down-scaled the climate of two synoptic stations using HADCM3 model and A2 emission scenario for 2040. We extracted extreme precipitation e...