Semi-arid ecosystems play a key role in global agricultural production, seasonal carbon cycle dynamics, and longer-run climate change. Because semi-arid landscapes are heterogeneous and often sparsely vegetated, repeated and large-scale ecosystem assessments of these regions have to date been impossible. Here, we assess the potential of high-spatial resolution visible band imagery for semi-arid...

Carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems is increasing along with the rising of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Embedded in this trend, recent studies suggested that the interannual variability (IAV) of global carbon fluxes may be dominated by semi-arid ecosystems, but the underlying mechanisms of this high variability in these specific regions are not well known. Here we derive an ensemble of gr...

Contamination of soil and water due to the release of light non-aqueous phase liquids (LNAPLs) is a ubiquitous problem. The problem is more severe in arid and semi-arid coastal regions where most of the petroleum production and related refinery industries are located. Biological treatment of these organic contaminated resources is receiving increasing interests and where applicable, can serve a...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the species-environment relationships in arid and semi-arid rangelandsof Nodushan, Yazd. The plant species cover and the environmental variables were measured at 9 sites. Soil sampleswere taken for measurement of 12 attributes in 0-10 cm and 10-80 cm layers. Vegetation was classified using twowayindicator species analysis (TWINSPAN). Data was analyzed u...

The annual cycles of soil moisture and NO2 have been analysed across the climate zones of West Africa using two satellite data sets (OMI on AURA and ASCAT on MetOp-A). Exploring the sources and sinks for NO2 it is clear that the densely populated urban cities including Lagos and Abuja had the highest mean NO2 concentrations (>1.8 × 10 15 molecules cm -2 ) indicative of the anthropogenic urban e...

Quantitative study of species diversity across different land use units and districts is important to document status of local plant biodiversity, to evaluate impact of management and for planning future management. This study aimed at determining impacts of land use units on species diversity and spatial distribution of species in two districts of Borana zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. Stratification ...

Depth of frost penetration is one of the main indices in agriculture, civil and transportation engineering. Soil temperature is a function of several factors including: topography, solar radiation, air temperature, moisture content and other physical properties of soil such as thermal capacity, coefficient of heat conductivity, and specific heat. The main objective of the present paper is to de...

Meteorological satellite data from 1982 to 1990 were used to identify areas of significant association between tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) and remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) anomalies, here taken as a surrogate for rainfall anomalies. During this period, large areas of arid and semi-arid Africa, Australia and South America experienced NDVI anoma...