Introduction Pastoralists who inhabit the African arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) are among the world’s poorest populations. They lack vital infrastructure in the form of accessible roads, electricity and telecommunications, leaving them increasingly isolated. Livestock holdings of cattle, camels, goats and sheep often comprise the bulk of their limited wealth and are an integral part of their ...

The state of development of drainage in arid and semi-arid countries is lagging far behind the development of irrigation. This leaves the worlds’ irrigated agriculture at high risk of losing productive lands to waterlogging and salinization. As development of new irrigation projects will not likely happen any more as in the sixties and seventies, drainage of existing irrigated lands can contrib...

Acid drainage (AD) has been recognized as one of the major problems facing the Australian mining industry. Much of Australia has a semi-arid to arid climate and is sparsely populated. The impact of AD is therefore less here than in many other countries. Nevertheless, community and shareholder expectations, and the globalization of Australian mining company activities, have ensured the industry ...

Eco-geomorphology and vegetation patterns in arid and semi-arid regions P. M. Saco, G R. Willgoose, and G. R. Hancock School of Engineering, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, 2308, Australia School of Environmental and Life Sciences, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, 2308, Australia Received: 13 June 2006 – Accepted: 30 June 2006 – Published: 30 Aug...

Water is a scarce commodity in desert regions; yet, most remote sensing experiments of soil moisture have been conducted in temperate areas. The ability to detect and reliably assess soil moisture in the arid environment has important implications both at the micro scale such as the individual farm and at the macro scale for climate modeling. A series of experiments utilizing an airborne scatte...

Abstract Desertification is one of the fundamental problems that threaten many arid and semi-arid areas. The formulation of the United Nation Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), adopted in Paris, 1994 and ratified in 1996, with the active participation of Egypt, gave emphasis on combating the major threats to sustainability of dry lands. Recently, different models were developed to fo...

This study analyzed extreme precipitation events, using daily rainfall data for 1966–2015. A Mann–Kendall trend test was used to evaluate trends in precipitation, copula functions were applied compute the joint return periods of and univariate bivariate distributions determine risk. The results showed that decrease consecutive wet days (CWD) significant west northwest Iran, while dry (CDD) inde...

Present-day climate cannot account for the presence of such lakes in the arid to semi arid area of Jordan. Therefore more intense and wetter Mediterranean cyclones in winter coupled with Arabian monsoon or even ArabianIndian monsoon in summer would have affected major parts of Jordan up to latitude 31° 32 ́ during the warmer periods of the Pleistocene and brought more rain to establish and susta...