In the semi-arid area of West Texas, drinking water is a precious commodity. Drinking water sources include water from Lake Meredith and groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer. Water usage in this area includes farming and irrigation, municipal use or cooling water for electricity generation. As population continues to grow and water usage increases, especially during periods of drought, the ava...

In contrast with the more arid savannah areas of West Africa, the central Guinea savannah (or V-Baoulé) of Côte d’Ivoire does not suffer from important forage shortage during the dry season. Since the 1970s the Ivorian government has made considerable efforts to increase local cattle-breeding activities in the area, which is suitable for trypanotolerant livestock production. Trypanosomosis cont...

L. Fengquan 7 B. Jianmin College of Environment and Construction Engineering Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun City. 130026. P.R. China Abstract The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau uplifted 13000 m in the Quaternary period. The average rate of uplift was 1–1.1 mm/year. The uplifting has remolded the geomorphology of China. The landform in China was changed from west-low and east-h...

Dark septate endophytic (DSE) fungi represent a frequent root-colonizing fungal group common in environments with strong abiotic stress, such as (semi)arid ecosystems. This work aimed to study the DSE fungi colonizing the plants of semiarid sandy grasslands with wood steppe patches on the Great Hungarian Plain. As we may assume that fungi colonizing both invasive and native species are generali...

of their natural distributions in southern Alberta, Canada. In this semi-arid area, poplars are obligate riparian species but they occupy several intergrading ecoregions. Populus deltoides Bartr. ex Marsh predominates in the warmest and driest eastern prairie ecoregions; P. balsamifera L. occupies the cooler and wetter western parkland and montane ecoregions; and P. angustifolia James and hybri...

The world’s arid lands are some of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth, and their paucity of vegetation often makes it possible to see landforms and structures with great clarity (Figure 1.1). In addition, they have many characteristics both in terms of landforms and geomorphological processes that render them different from other major environments (see, for example, Laity, 2008; Parsons an...