Desert ecosystems spanning moisture conditions from dry grasslands to barren hyper-arid landscapes are the largest terrestrial biome with more than 40% of the terrestrial landmass. Remote sensing data provide an efficient costeffective means to assess biophysical indicators of land degradation and desertification, providing that essential ecosystem properties can be monitored. We review the spe...

In semiarid or arid conditions, the change of root-zone soil moisture can be almost instantaneously reflected by vegetation through biophysical process. This study investigated feasibility of mapping root-zone soil moisture using MODIS-derived NDVI via statistic approach at three sites (New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas) selected from the Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN). These three sites rep...

     Drought as a natural phenomenon characterized by a significant decrease of water availability during a period of time and over a large area. In recent years, droughts and its frequent in arid and semi-arid regions like Iran on the one hand, and water demand has been rising on the other hand and, as a result, their impacts are being aggravated. Therefore, the meteorological and hydrological...

One of the characters in Iranian Model of Desertification Potential Assessment (IMDPA) is soil. Since soil is very important in the degradation of land, so some indices were determined for this character in order to evaluate desertification potential of arid, semi-arid and dry sub humid areas of Iran. The indices included soil texture, deep gravel percentage, soil depth, and EC. To calibrate th...

In order to evaluate the soil salinization risk of the oases in arid land of northwest China, we chose a typical oasis-the Yanqi basin as the research area. Then, we collected soil samples from the area and made comprehensive assessment for soil salinization risk in this area. The result showed that: (1) In all soil samples, high variation was found for the amount of Ca2+ and K+, while the othe...

Societies in semi-arid areas in developing regions are amongst those most vulnerable to climate variability and potentially most vulnerable to climate change. The vulnerability to climate variability emerges from a combination of the level of availability of natural resources and the human dependency on these resources. In semi-arid regions, the limited availability of water and the low reliabi...