The urban heat island (UHI), the phenomenon of higher temperatures in urban land than the surrounding rural land, is commonly attributed to changes in biophysical properties of the land surface associated with urbanization. Here we provide evidence for a long-held hypothesis that the biogeochemical effect of urban aerosol or haze pollution is also a contributor to the UHI. Our results are based...

Department of Biological Sciences, Center for Plant Lipid Research, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas 76203 (P.J.H., C.N.J., K.D.C.); Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1 (S.K.G., R.T.M.); Department of Biological Sciences, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee 37614 (A.K.); United States Department of Agri...

Small−holder farming in semi−arid areas is being forced to change to compensate for the needs of more people living under conditions of increasingly variable rainfall. As more land is used for agriculture, rangeland areas are reduced, so limiting the availability of animal fodder. The length of fallow periods where soil fertility may be restored is also reduced. This has forced herders and farm...

1 Department of Arid Land Agriculture, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2 Desert Agriculture Initiative, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, 3 Agriculture Genetic Engineering Research Institute, Agriculture Research Center, Giza, Egypt, 4 Department of Soil and Environmental Science, Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan, ...

The Heihe River Basin (HRB) is a typical arid inland river basin in northwestern China. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the downstream flow in the HRB declined as a result of large, artificial changes in the distribution of water and land and a lack of effective water resource management. Consequently, the ecosystems of the lower reaches of the basin substantially deteriorated. To restore these de...

Terrestrial vegetation dynamics are closely influenced by both climate and by both climate and by land use and/or land cover change (LULCC) caused by human activities. Both can change over time in a monotonic way and it can be difficult to separate the effects of climate change from LULCC on vegetation. Here we attempt to attribute trends in the fractional green vegetation cover to climate vari...

The purpose of this study is to investigate variations in soil organic carbon (SOC) in arid areas due to differences in the cultivation history, land use, and soil salinization. The study area is the lower Sangong River basin on the piedmont of the northern TianShan mountains, which experiences heavy land-use activities. In 1982 and 2005,127(152) and 74 (161) samples in old (new) oasis were col...

Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of land surface phenology is important to understanding changes in landscape ecological processes of semi-arid savannas in Southern Africa. The aim of the study was to determine the influence of variation in tree cover percentage on land surface phenological response in the semi-arid savanna of Southern Africa. Various land surface phenological metrics...

Large-scale vegetation restoration in China’s Loess Plateau has been initiated by the central government for controlling soil andwater losses in the past three decades. However, there is virtually no guidance for plant species selection for the restoration purpose. We investigated the effects of planting trees and shrubs, land-use conversions from croplands to pastures and native grasslands on ...

objective: more than 75 percent of iran is located in arid and semi-arid then land degradation and desertification are one of the crises ecological. we require a proper understanding of causes and processes of desertification to control the huge phenomenon on the global and regional situation. because southeast of iran located in arid land then assessment of desertification is very importance f...