Shrubs have been reported to expand into grassland and polar regions in the world, which causes complex changes in ecosystem carbon, nutrients, and resilience. Given the projected global drying trend, shrubs with their superior drought resistance and tolerance may play more important roles in global ecosystem function. Shrubland exists in all of the climate zones in China, from subtropical to t...

Vegetation patterns are strongly influenced by sand mobility in desert ecosystems. However, little is known about the spatial patterns of Artemisia ordosica, a dominant shrub in the Mu Us desert of Northwest China, in relation to sand fixation. The aim of this study was to investigate and contrast the effects of sand dune stabilization on the population and spatial distribution of this desert s...

Recently, a wide range of quantitative research on the identification of environmental flow requirements (EFRs) has been conducted. However, little focus is given to EFRs to maintain multiple ecosystem services in oasis areas. The present study quantifies the EFRs in oasis areas of Tarim Basin, Xinjiang, Northwest China on the basis of three ecosystem services: (1) maintenance of riverine ecosy...

L. Song, X. M. Bao, X. J. Liu, Y. Zhang, P. Christie, A. Fangmeier, and F. S. Zhang College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, Key Laboratory of Plant-Soil Interactions of the Ministry of Education, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Urumqi 83...

Desert shrubs, a dominant component of desert ecosystems, need to maintain sufficient levels of nutrients in their different organs to ensure operation of various physiological functions for the purpose of survival and reproduction. In the present study, we analyzed 10 elements in leaves, stems, and roots of 24 dominant shrub species from 52 sites across a temperate desert ecosystem in northwes...

Fan Zhang,* Hongbo Zhang, Scott C. Hagen, Ming Ye, Dingbao Wang, Dongwei Gui, Chen Zeng, Lide Tian and Jingshi Liu 1 Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 2 Key Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Be...

The Gurbantunggut Desert, the largest fixed and semi-fixed desert in China, is characterized by a predominant coverage of lichen-dominated biological soil crusts, which serve an indispensable role in sand fixation. Two findings of biological soil crusts have been disclosed from previous field observations: first, distribution of biological soil crusts is selective upon locations; second, specie...

Desert plants are exposed to a combination of environmental stress conditions, including water deficit, high temperature and high irradiance. We focused on antioxidative protection systems of C4 desert plant Haloxylon ammodendron and C3 desert plant Hedysarum scoparium within arid dune ecosystem with artificial controlling water availability. The activities of antioxidative enzymes (SOD, POD an...

The heavy air pollution, known as Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC), has been research mainly for its radiative effects and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) activity that act to nucleate larger number of smaller cloud drops, and hence suppress coalescence and warm rain forming processes (Ramanathan et al., 2001). Precipitation in convective clouds with aerosol-induced suppressed coalescence is initi...

The goal of this study was to gain insight into the diversity of culturable actinobacteria in desert soil crusts and to determine the physiological characteristics of the predominant actinobacterial group in these crusts. Culture-dependent method was employed to obtain actinobacterial strains from desert soil samples collected from Shapotou National Desert Ecological Reserve (NDER) located in T...