Desertification, one of the most severe types of land degradation in the world, is of great importance because it is occurring, to some degree, on approximately 40% of the global land area and is affecting more than 1 billion people. In this study, we used a space-for-time method to quantify the impact of five different desertification regimes (potential (PD), light (LD), moderate (MD), severe ...

Salinization is an important and increasingly prevalent issue which has broad and profound effects on plant survival and distribution pattern. To understand the patterns and potential drivers of leaf traits in saline environments, we determined the soil properties, leaf morphological traits (specific leaf area, SLA, and leaf dry matter content, LDMC), leaf chemical traits (leaf carbon, C, nitro...

Soils with pedogenic carbonate cover about 30% (3.44 10 km) of China, mainly across its arid and semiarid regions in the Northwest. Based on the second national soil survey (1979–1992), total soil inorganic carbon (SIC) storage in China was estimated to be 53.3 6.3 PgC (1 Pg5 10 g) to the depth investigated to 2 m. Soil inorganic carbon storages were 4.6, 10.6, 11.1, and 20.8 Pg for the depth r...

We identified the spatiotemporal patterns of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the years 1982-2008 in the desert areas of Northwest China and quantified the impacts of climate and non-climate factors on NDVI changes. The results indicate that although the mean NDVI has improved in 24.7% of the study region; 16.3% among the region has been stagnating in recent years and only ...

Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Desert Animal Adaptations and Husbandry, Wyler Department of Dryland Agriculture, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel, Department of Ecology and Environment Conservation, Omsk State Pedagogical Univ...

principle." This labelling is somewhat confusing given that desert as a limiting principle is neither new, having blossomed most recently with Norval Morris several decades ago, nor compatible with empirical desert. The latter provides a specific punishment amount, while the former claims that desert can only identify the extremes that mark the outer boundaries of a broad range of punishment. S...

[1] To reduce uncertainties in the quantitative assessment of aerosol effects on regional climate and environmental changes, extensive measurements of aerosol optical properties were made with handheld Sun photometers in the Chinese Sun Hazemeter Network (CSHNET) starting in August 2004. Regional characteristics of the aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 500 nm and Ångström exponent (a) computed usi...