Microbial communities in soils may change in accordance with distance, season, climate, soil texture and other environmental parameters. Microbial diversity patterns have been extensively surveyed in temperate regions, but few such studies attempted to address them with respect to spatial and temporal scales and their correlations to environmental factors, especially in arid ecosystems. In orde...

This study explores the photosynthetic microbial colonization of rhyolitic ignimbrites in Lomas de Tilocalar, a hyper-arid region of the Atacama Desert, Chile. Colonization appeared in the form of a green layer a few millimeters beneath the ignimbrite surface. Some ignimbrite rocks revealed two distinct micromorphological areas of identical mineralogical and chemical composition but different t...

plant biomass is an important factor for determining arid and semi-aridrangelands capacity. due to the lack of proper and annual sampling of rangelands, there areno suitable data to determine biomass, range condition and proper range managementoperations. plant biomass is one of the measurable attributes that can be assessed inrangeland studies. since the clip and weight method is destructive a...

The hyper-arid core of the Atacama Desert (Chile) is the driest place on Earth and is considered a close analogue to the extremely arid conditions on the surface of Mars. Microbial life is very rare in soils of this hyper-arid region, and autotrophic micro-organisms are virtually absent. Instead, photosynthetic micro-organisms have successfully colonized the interior of halite crusts, which are...

This article reviews current knowledge on microbial communities inhabiting endolithic habitats in the arid and hyper-arid regions of our planet. In these extremely dry environments, the most common survival strategy is to colonize the interiors of rocks. This habitat provides thermal buffering, physical stability, and protection against incident UV radiation, excessive photosynthetically active...

Abstract In most land-surface models, the evolution of soil moisture is governed by soil-hydraulic processes. hyper-arid soils, these processes break down, but continues to show clear temporal variations, suggesting that other may be at work. We hypothesize in such soils varies due evaporation and vapour fluxes air–soil interface. To test this, we include exchange between air a model, apply mod...

The extent to which the latitudinal gradient in species richness may be paralleled by a similar gradient of increasing functional or phylogenetic diversity is a matter of controversy. We evaluated whether taxonomic richness (TR) is informative in terms of ecological diversity (ED, an approximation to functional diversity) and phylogenetic diversity (AvPD) using data on 531 mammal species repres...