Climate change is having a tremendous influence on world food production, with arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas especially susceptible. In these areas, locally adapted crop varieties or landraces can be used to mitigate the of climate current future security challenges. The high genetic diversity within populations allows for crops adapt changing environments other stresses that growth ...

Increasing trends of groundwater and soil salinization, as well desertification, is characteristic many arid semi-arid regions under climatic anthropogenic influences. This has led to the implementation management strategies protect ecological environment. Changling County in Northeast China a typical area that experienced these changes. Thus, such “Three North Shelterbelt Project” which involv...

A common pattern in neotropical Leishmania spp. transmission is the co-occurrence of several sand fly (SF) species at endemic foci. We collected 13 SF spp. by direct aspiration in natural resting places (NRP) and 10 SF spp. with Shannon traps (ST), totaling 15 spp. with both methods, at 6 locations within a semi-arid region with endemic visceral leishmaniasis transmission in Falcón State, North...

Five separate test sites were established in 1994 to evaluate the use of municipal sewage sludge as a soil amendment and conditioner (hereafter referred to as “biosolids”) on the Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation’s tailings impoundment near Magna, Utah. Each site was divided into 16 test plots to evaluate four replications of the four rates of biosolids addition and incorporation into the taili...

Biogeochemical factors contributing to enhanced carbon storage following afforestation of a semi-arid shrubland J. M. Grünzweig, I. Gelfand, and D. Yakir Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture, Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot 76100, Israel Department of Environmental Sciences and Energ...

BACKGROUND Tortoises (Testudinidae) occur in a wide range of environments, providing important ecosystem functions, such as seed dispersal and refuge in the form of burrows. Tortoise movement has previously been shown to be related to resource availability, reproductive status and local environmental conditions. However, understanding of the variables that drive their movement remains comparati...

impressive Quaternary lacustrine deposits are present as terrace remnants throughout the Karakoram Mountains, northern Pakistan. They are mainly the result of damming of drainage systems during glacial advances or by catastrophic mass movement deposits. The longevity of most lakes is relatively short, in the order of years to tens of yeaa, but sedimentation rates are extremely high as a consequ...