Science is frequently touted as the solution to dryland management problems, yet most management decisions are, by necessity, based primarily on expert knowledge and experience. This paper describes an integrated framework for organizing, synthesizing, and applying our growing understanding of aridland ecosystems using a flexible, multi-objective assessment, monitoring, and management approach....

Thar region of Rajasthan, with its varied characteristics in culture, economies, the environment, governance and religion, is home to semi-urban and urban agriculture that seems to have originated in the Fertile Crescent of the homeland of the first farmers. Arid lands and deserts make up a large part of Rajasthan. Two-thirds of the state is desert or dry-lands. Half the state’s population is f...

The objective of this research was to determine the best model and compare performances in terms of producing landuse maps from six supervised classification algorithms. As a result, different algorithms such as the minimum distance ofmean (MDM), Mahalanobis distance (MD), maximum likelihood (ML), artificial neural network (ANN), spectral anglemapper (SAM), and support vector machine (SVM) were...

Arid regions are an important part of the world as they cover more than 40% of the land surface and they can provide sufficient opportunities for extensive development. However, urban development of these regions is facing a set of problems. This is besides the development barriers due to the arid regions climate associated with a set of economical, social, administrative, and physical problems...

Aims Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key component of water balance and is closely linked to ecosystem productivity. In arid regions, large proportion of precipitation (PPT) is returned to the atmosphere through ET, with only a small amount available to plants. Our objective was to examine the variability in ET–soil water relationship based on a set of ecosystems that are representative for semi-a...

Four weeds (Acorus calamus, Artemisia tridentata, Heliopsis longipes, and Tagetes minuta) and three cultivated plants (Azadirachta indica, Mammea americana, and Ocimum basilicum) are potential candidates for crop development and commercialization for sources of insect attractants, repellants, or toxicants. Although all could be commercially viable, the neem tree (A. indica) is by far the most l...

The semi-arid grasslands in Inner Mongolia (IM) are under increasing stress owing to climate change and rapid socio-economic development in the recent past. We investigated changes in land cover/land use and landscape structure between 1992 and 2004 through the analysis of AVHRR and MODIS derived land cover data. The scale of analysis included the regional level (i.e. the whole of IM) as well a...