a r t i c l e i n f o Land degradation in drylands is one of the major environmental issues of the 21st century particularly due to its impact on world food security and environmental quality. Climate change, shifts in vegetation composition, accelerated soil erosion processes, and disturbances have rendered these landscapes susceptible to rapid degradation that has important feedbacks on regio...

desertification is more related to social and anthropogenic issues than natural causes and it becomes moreimportant over the time. human effects on desertification could be classified as direct and indirect factors. this studyhas focused on the effect of management factor, as a dominant case, on desertification of kashan region based onimdpa (imdpa: iranian model of desertification for potentia...

desertification is one of the major issues threatening human communities. manymethods have been developed for assessment and mapping of desertification hazards. in thisresearch, multi-criteria evaluation method was used to investigate desertification process introuti watershed, golestan province, iran. at the first step, major desertification factors weredetermined by doing field surveys. they ...

desertification is more related to social and anthropogenic issues than natural causes and it becomes moreimportant over the time. human effects on desertification could be classified as direct and indirect factors. this studyhas focused on the effect of management factor, as a dominant case, on desertification of kashan region based onimdpa (imdpa: iranian model of desertification for potentia...

This paper investigates the hydrological interactions in the atmosphere-evegetation-soil system by using the bucket model and several new simplified intermediately complex models. The results of mathematical analysis and numerical simulations show that these models, despite their simplicity, can very clearly reveal the essential features of the rather complex hydrological system of atmosphere-e...

BACKGROUND Biological soil crusts are common components of desert ecosystem; they cover ground surface and interact with topsoil that contribute to desertification control and degraded land restoration in arid and semiarid regions. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To distinguish the changes in topsoil affected by biological soil crusts, we compared topsoil properties across three types of succe...

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and its sister conventions, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, all aim to halt or mitigate the deterioration of the ecological processes on which life depends. Sustainable land management (SLM) is fundamental to achieving the goals of all three Conventions. Changes in land ...

Horqin Sandy Land is a fragile, seriously desertified region located in Inner Mongolia of China. Overgrazing is one of the primary drivers of desertification in this region. We investigated whether the establishment of grazing exclosures in areas with active sand dunes enhances soil carbon (C) sequestration and benefits soil recovery. The results showed that soil organic C storage was 1.4, 1.9,...

Desertification is recognized as a serious environmental threat in Iran because of its climatic-geomorphologicconditions. Desertification and land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid regions, is a globalenvironmental problem. Accurate assessment of the status and trend of desertification is instrumental in developingglobal strategies to prevent and reverse this problem. The goal o...