Use of carbon isotope analysis to understand semi-arid erosion dynamics and long-term semi-arid land degradation

Modeling Carbon Sinks and Sources in semi-arid Environments for a Land Degradation Assessment Approach

Contrary to wetlands or moderate climates, the understanding of carbon exchange between ecosystem and atmosphere in arid and semi-arid environments is more challenging due to the sensible feedback of terrestrial ecosystems to environmental variability. Especially in the savannah regions of South Africa the biomes are strongly affected on the one hand by low and sporadic precipitation and on the...

Soils of Arid and Semi-arid Areas

00554 - 9 - Arid and Semi - Arid Geomorphology

The world’s arid lands are some of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth, and their paucity of vegetation often makes it possible to see landforms and structures with great clarity (Figure 1.1). In addition, they have many characteristics both in terms of landforms and geomorphological processes that render them different from other major environments (see, for example, Laity, 2008; Parsons an...

Exploring the relationship between land use and surface water quality using multivariate statistics in arid and semi-arid regions

The relative impacts of different types of land use on the surface water quality are yet to be ascertained and quantified. In this paper, the influence of different types of land use on surface water quality is investigated. Rain events samples from different land use in the central plateau, Iran, were analyzed for major ions. Statistical analyses were employed to examine the statistical relati...

Trend analysis and detection of precipitation fluctuations in arid and semi-arid regions

The most important impacts of climate change relate to temperature and precipitation. Precipitation is particularly important, because changes in precipitation patterns may lead to floods or droughts in different areas. Also, precipitation is a major factor in agriculture and in recent years interest has increased in learning about precipitation variability for periods of months to annual and s...