Present-day climate cannot account for the presence of such lakes in the arid to semi arid area of Jordan. Therefore more intense and wetter Mediterranean cyclones in winter coupled with Arabian monsoon or even ArabianIndian monsoon in summer would have affected major parts of Jordan up to latitude 31° 32 ́ during the warmer periods of the Pleistocene and brought more rain to establish and susta...

Acid drainage (AD) has been recognized as one of the major problems facing the Australian mining industry. Much of Australia has a semi-arid to arid climate and is sparsely populated. The impact of AD is therefore less here than in many other countries. Nevertheless, community and shareholder expectations, and the globalization of Australian mining company activities, have ensured the industry ...

Ethiopia is heavily dependent on its agricultural sector, which has suffered from recurrent droughts. Rapid population growth, change of arable land to urban expansion, climate change, unemployment, waterlogging in wetland areas, salinity arid and semi-arid, acidity high rainfall depletion natural resources are causing food shortages. Productivity performance the agriculture sector critical imp...

In many arid and semiarid regions, saline playas represent a significant source of unconsolidated sediments available for aeolian transport, and severe saline dust storms occur frequently due to human disturbance. In this study, saline dust storms are reviewed systematically from the aspects of concept, general characteristics, conditions of occurrence, distribution and ecological impact. Our r...

Agave is a good source of polysaccharides for the production of fermentable sugars as sustainable bioenergy feedstock solutions for semi-arid and arid lands. This plant grows in arid areas, which correspond to a large territory in northern Mexico. Having lignocellulose as the polysaccharide of interest, the information for the enzymatic saccharification of this kind of material is limited. Agav...

In arid regions, C3 vegetation is assumed to be more sensitive to precipitation and CO2 fertilization than C4 vegetation. In this study, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used to examine vegetation growth in the arid Lower Heihe River Basin, northwestern China, for the past three decades. The results indicate that maximum NDVI (MNDVI) of the area increases over the years and is s...

soil moisture is one of the critical parameters in climatic, ecological and hydrological modeling and vegetation growth. soil moisture is important for environmental studies but due to ground-based point measurement of soil moisture is expensive and impractical for watershed measurement, this parameter is not be used widely to simulate and predict models. overall and uniform view on different p...

environmental stress, particularly drought stress can play an important role in reducing plant growth especially during the germination stage in arid and semi-arid regions in iran. for cultivation of medicinal plants in arid and semi-arid areas, the assessment of their tolerance is very important. in this research, in order to evaluate the effects of salicylic acid pretreatment on enhancement o...

We will exaiuiue the hopes arid dreams of a decade ago wlreu there was a lot of exciteiueiit in the COIIIIIIUiiity about what could be accomplished with niodelbased visioii ill robotics. Mauy of those dreams have iiot yet materialized because of a lack of availability of “visioil“ itiodcls (as opposed to CAD models): difficulty of coiistructiug vision models, iuadequate robustness of model-base...

The rapid expansion of deserts in recent decades as a result of human actions combined with climatic disasters has highlighted the necessity to understand biological processes in arid environments. Whereas physical processes and the biology of flora and fauna have been relatively well studied in marginally used arid areas, knowledge of desert soil micro-organisms remains fragmentary. This chapt...