Soil salinity and drought are among the environmental stresses that most severely affect plant growth and production around the world. In this study the rhizospheres of Salicornia plants and bulk soils were collected from Sebkhet and Chott hypersaline ecosystems in Tunisia. Depiction of bacterial microbiome composition by Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis unveiled the occurrence of a high...

The peri-urban area is the region where there is a more dynamic interaction between the urban and rural. The peri-urban area supplies natural resources, such as land for urban expansion and agricultural products to feed the urban population. In arid and semi-arid lands, such as northern Mexico, these areas may also be the source of water for the city's domestic demand. In addition, scholars arg...

Rock varnish coats many surfaces of geomorphic and archaeologic interest in arid lands. All varnish dating techniques are limited by the time lag between the exposure of a surface to subaerial processes and the onset of varnishing. They are valid only where manganese is not remobilized after deposition, for example, in most arid environments. The premise of a new age-determination method, catio...

There are pressing concerns about the interplay between agricultural productivity, water demand, and water availability in semi-arid to arid regions of the world. Currently, irrigated agriculture is the dominant water user in these regions and is estimated to consume approximately 80% of the world’s diverted freshwater resources. We develop an improved irrigated land-use mapping algorithm that ...

Desertification of the arid and semi-arid lands of the world has been proceeding for more than a thousand years.Human-induced degradation in these areas is regularly cited as one of the principal causes of desertification.Euphrates and Tigris Basin as the case study of this research in some aspects is almost unique in the world. But thisbasin has been confronted to progressive desertification. ...

Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) is the most prominent cause of Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) variability in any landscape. Kenyan Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs) have been facing extensive land use/ cover changes in the last three decades prompting a review on the impacts it has on soil quality and consequently on land degradation. This study was carried out in 2016 in Olesharo Catchment, N...

Direct seeding is a common large-scale restoration practice for revegetating arid and semi-arid lands, but success can be limited by moisture and temperature. Seed coating technologies that use biochar may have the potential to overcome moisture and temperature limitations on native plant germination and growth. Biochar is a popular agronomic tool for improving soil properties, such as water av...

Soil salinity undermines global agriculture by reducing crop yield and impairing soil quality. Irrigation management can help control salinity levels within the soil root-zone. To best manage water and soil resources, accurate regional-scale inventories of soil salinity are needed. The past decade has seen several successful applications of soil salinity remote sensing. Two salinity remote sens...

Background: Salinity is one of the major abiotic stresses affecting plant production in arid and semi-arid regions. It causes reduction of cultivable area and combined with other factors, presents a serious threat to food stability in these areas. Context: In front of this problem, the selection of salt tolerant species and varieties remains the best economic approach for exploitation and rehab...

Desert ecosystems are more complex than expected and, in this type of habitat, interspecific interactions can be an important force structuring the community. In this paper we described an interaction appearing between an harvester ant species (Messor bouvieri) and several arthropod taxa feeding on ant-nest debris in a southern European arid land. We have found 23 arthropod taxa associated with...