Abstract In Namibia, leopards ( Panthera pardus ) are widely distributed, used commercially as trophy animals and often persecuted for perceived or real predation on livestock valuable game species outside protected areas. Therefore, leopard populations living in areas might be important source maintaining connectivity. Little data their population sizes densities available from the northern p...

The cacti are one of the most celebrated radiations of succulent plants. There has been much speculation about their age, but progress in dating cactus origins has been hindered by the lack of fossil data for cacti or their close relatives. Using a hybrid phylogenomic approach, we estimated that the cactus lineage diverged from its closest relatives ≈35 million years ago (Ma). However, major di...

The avian genus Cinclodes (Furnariidae) includes species that inhabit both inland and marine shores. We compared the carbon isotopic composition and osmoregulatory capacities of field caught individuals of three Cinclodes species in Chile. Cinclodes nigrofumosus is a resident of coastal shores, whereas C. oustaleti and C. patagonicus inhabit both coastal and inland environments. The tissues of ...

The work reported here evaluates whether bacteria populating arid and salty environments can confer resistance in tomato and pepper plants to water stress. Plant growth-promoting bacteria that have ACC deaminase activity were isolated from soil samples taken from the Arava region of southern Israel. One of these strains, Achromobacter piechaudii ARV8 [Mayak et al., Plant growth-promoting bacter...

Leaf veins supply the mesophyll with water that evaporates when stomata are open to allow CO2 uptake for photosynthesis. Theoretical analyses suggest that water is optimally distributed in the mesophyll when the lateral distance between veins (dx) is equal to the distance from these veins to the epidermis (dy), expressed as dx:dy ≈ 1. Although this theory is supported by observations of many de...

Amphibians are a globally distributed and diverse lineage, but much of our current understanding of their population genetic structure comes from studies in mesic temperate habitats. We characterize the population genetic structure of two sympatric explosive breeding amphibians in the southwestern deserts of the United States: the Great Plains toad (Anaxyrus cognatus) and Couch's spadefoot toad...

Riparian Zones are considered biodiversity and ecosystem services hotspots. In arid environments, these ecosystems represent key habitats, since water availability makes them unique in terms of fauna, flora and ecological processes. Simple yet powerful remote sensing techniques were used to assess how spatial and temporal land cover dynamics, and water depth reflect distribution of key land cov...

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...

Retrieval of eco-hydrological variables/parameters from the orld’s cold and arid regions using remote sensing is more chalenging compared to other regions, and less research work on uantitative remote sensing has been carried out in these specific egions. This is because: (1) Cold and arid regions are most likely o be located in theworld’s remote and relatively under-developed reas, where conve...

Karst spring systems provide permanent water sources in semi-arid to arid environments, supporting a diverse aquatic community. Numerous karst streams in the Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos regions of Texas support two distinct fish assemblages, spring-associated species and riverine species. Previous studies have identified constant water temperature as the segregating factor but have lacked t...