Groundwater storage (GS) is the major water resource for vegetation in drylands. Thus, positive relationships between vegetative growth condition (VGC) and GS are expected Since mining-induced dewatering tends to deplete surrounding mine sites, VGC should become less favorable due a shortage of accessible water. However, quantitative analysis repealed opposite. We found that global annual miner...

[1] Well-defined vegetation patterns are a widespread feature of dryland landscapes, where spotted, banded, or other organized systems of vegetation patches are bordered by bare soil. A number of different mechanisms have been invoked to explain the emergence of these patterns and to associate their geometrical features to the driving (biotic and abiotic) processes. A commonly accepted theory o...

Lack of research into the complexity in urban land conversion, and paucity of observational data of soil organic carbon (SOC) beneath impervious surface area (ISA) limit our understanding of the urbanization effects on carbon (C) pools in dryland cities. Employing Landsat TM images acquired in 1990 and 2010, a hybrid classification method consisting of Linear Spectral Mixture Analysis and decis...

A large proportion of rainfall in dryland ecosystems is intercepted by plant foliage and is generally assumed to evaporate to the atmosphere or drip onto the soil surface without being absorbed. We demonstrate foliar absorption of intercepted rainfall in a widely distributed, continental dryland, woody-plant genus: Juniperus. We observed substantial improvement in plant water status, exceeding ...

Stressors including regional climate change, economic development effects upon land use and an increasing demand for food production have resulted in significant impacts on the dryland ecosystems in the East Asia (DEA) region. Ecosystem services, such as its provisional services in providing forage for grazing as well as its functional services in regulating water and carbon fluxes, have been s...

The soil water supply is the main factor that limits dryland crop production in China. In a three-year field experiment at a dryland farming experimental station, we evaluated the effects of various straw mulch practices on soil water storage, grain yield, and water use efficiency (WUE) of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum). Field experiments were conducted with six different mulch combinations (...