South Africa's land policies have increased women's participation in agriculture, but limited information exists about their agricultural activities. We surveyed 911 women working on the Makhatini Flats in Northern KwaZulu-Natal in 2006, gathering data on demographics, agricultural activities, crop production and pesticide use in both irrigated and Dryland areas. Average age of participants was...

Habitat and species richness in drylands are affected by the dynamics of a few key species, termed "ecosystem engineers." These species modulate the landscape and redistribute the water resources so as to allow the introduction of other species. A mathematical model is developed for a pair of ecosystem engineers commonly found in drylands: plants forming vegetation patterns and cyanobacteria fo...

a r t i c l e i n f o Land degradation in drylands is one of the major environmental issues of the 21st century particularly due to its impact on world food security and environmental quality. Climate change, shifts in vegetation composition, accelerated soil erosion processes, and disturbances have rendered these landscapes susceptible to rapid degradation that has important feedbacks on regio...

We briefly review how microbial biotechnology can contribute to improve activities aiming to restore degraded drylands and to combat their desertification, which are an integral part of the Sustainable Development Goal 15 of the 2030 Agenda. Microbial biotechnology offers notable promise to improve restoration actions based on the use of biocrust-forming engineered cyanobacteria, which play key...

Drylands cover 40% of the global terrestrial surface and provide important ecosystem services. While drylands as a whole are expected to increase in extent and aridity in coming decades, temperature and precipitation forecasts vary by latitude and geographic region suggesting different trajectories for tropical, subtropical, and temperate drylands. Uncertainty in the future of tropical and subt...

Water resources play a vital role in ecosystem stability, human survival, and social development in drylands. Human activities, such as afforestation and irrigation, have had a large impact on the water cycle and vegetation in drylands over recent years. The Badain Jaran Desert (BJD) is one of the driest regions in China with increasing human activities, yet the connection between human managem...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important component of the global carbon cycle yet is rarely quantified adequately in terms of its spatial variability resulting from losses of SOC due to erosion by water. Furthermore, in drylands, little is known about the effect of widespread vegetation change on changes in SOC stores and the potential for water erosion to redistribute SOC around the landscape...

In semiarid drylands water shortage and trampling by large herbivores are two factors limiting plant growth and distribution. Trampling can strongly affect plant performance, but little is known about responses of morphological and mechanical traits of woody plants to trampling and their possible interaction with water availability. Seedlings of four shrubs (Caragana intermedia, Cynanchum komar...

This research was designed to evaluate and compare the applicability of two different types of irrigation including traditionally (surface irrigation) and simple sub-surface drip irrigation (using pricked-pipe covered with plastic cloth). Two plots containing 39 pistachio trees with 720 m2 area were selected in Rafsanjan, Iran. Both plots were irrigated using exactly the same quantity and quali...

Vegetation patches in drylands are localized structures of biomass and water. We study these structures using a mathematical modeling approach that captures biomass-water feedbacks. Biomass-water structures are found to differ in their spatial forms and ecological functions, depending on species type, soil conditions, precipitation range, and other environmental factors. Asymptotic spot structu...