Salt-impacted soils occur in floodplains, wetlands and backswamps in arid climates. These soils become sinks or temporary storage sites for soluble salts and contaminants including agricultural chemicals, industrial pollutants and radionuclides such as I. The vertical distribution of I in the Black Butte soil series along the Virgin river was assessed and the distribution of I between I , IO 3 ...

Goji (fruits of Lycium barbarum L. and L. chinense Mill.) has been used in China as food and medicine for millennia, and globally has been consumed increasingly as a healthy food. Ningxia, with a semi-arid climate, always had the reputation of producing best goji quality (daodi area). Recently, the increasing market demand pushed the cultivation into new regions with different climates. We ther...

The Mediterranean regions are submitted to a large variety of climates. In general, the environments are arid and semi-arid with summers characterised by high temperatures and small precipitation. Due to the scarcity of water resources, the correct evaluation of water losses by the crops as evapotranspiration (ET) is very important in these regions. In this paper, we initially present the most ...

Nomadism is found mostly in marginal areas which support only relatively sparse populations, particularly in the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa and Asia. It is a traditional form of society that allows the mobility and flexibility necessary for relatively even use of vegetation over large areas of low quality rangeland. It also facilitates more social interaction than would be possible am...

Previous studies examined the possibility to estimate the aeolian aerodynamic roughness length from satellites, either from visible/near-infrared observations or from microwave backscattering measurements. Here we compare the potential of the two approaches and propose to merge the two sources of information to benefit from their complementary aspects, i.e. the high spatial resolution of the vi...

The inter-comparison of different soil moisture (SM) products over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) reveals the inconsistency among different SM products, when compared to in situ measurement. It highlights the need to constrain the model simulated SM with the in situ measured data climatology. In this study, the in situ soil moisture networks, combined with the classification of climate zones over the...

GRANT, C. C. BIGGS, H.C. MEISSNER, H.H. & SASSON, P.A. 1996. The usefulness of faecal phosphorus and nitrogen in interpreting differences in live-mass gain and the response to P supplementation in grazing cattle in arid regions. Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research, 2:121-126 The average daily gains of heifers and oxen on commercial and experimental farms in Namibia were used to indicat...

Most palaeoecological research has focused on glacial– interglacial oscillations as the major climatic changes in Amazonia during the Quaternary (Haffer, 1969; Colinvaux et al., 2000; Pennington et al., 2000). Nevertheless accumulating data point to the importance of Holocene cycles of drought as a potent force shaping lowland communities. Servant et al. (1981) predicted the presence of a midHo...