a long-term field experiment was conducted for 7 years to evaluate the effect of different amendments to mitigate the adverse effect of saline-sodic water in a calcareous soil under cotton-wheat cropping system. the pooled results over 7 years revealed that the application of saline-sodic water decreased the mean cotton-seed yield by 20.7% as compared to good quality canal water. however, wheat...

The study of species coexistence and community assembly has been a hot topic in ecology for decades. Disentangling the hierarchical role of abiotic and biotic filters is crucial to understand community assembly processes. The most critical environmental factor in semi-arid environments is known to be water availability, and perennials are usually described as nurses that create milder local con...

Soil moisture is critical parameters in climatic and hydrological modeling and vegetation growth. Ground-based point measurement of soil moisture is liable but expensive and impractical for watershed measurement. Remote sensing measurement has provided thriving perspective for spatial and instantaneous measurement of soil moisture. Microwave measurement is effective and successful for surface s...

The influence of biological soil crusts (BSCs) on the small-scale spatial distribution of inorganic nitrogen (N) in drylands is largely unknown, despite their known impact and importance on the N cycle in these environments. We evaluated how perennial plants and BSCs affected small-scale spatial patterns of soil inorganic N (ammonium and nitrate) availability in a semiarid grassland from Spain....

fire is one of the incorporate vegetation management practices for grasslands and semi-arid rangelands. it may affect symbiotic relationship between range plants and mycorrhiza. accordingly, this research was aimed to investigate the effects of a spring prescribed fire on the symbiotic relationships between mycorrhiza and 6 plant species. the study was conducted in a semi-arid steppe rangeland ...

Phytoremediation is a promising method for remediation of heavy metals (HMs) contaminated environments. However, the main failures are the limited bioavailabilty of HMs such as lead (Pb) in the soil and/or suppressed plant growth in contaminated sites. These limitations specifically occur in semi-arid zone environments such as calcareous soils. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and plant growt...

Many studies at the regional scale have found either negative or hump-shaped relationships between productivity and diversity, and some theories propose that these occur because soil resource heterogeneity is either lower or less important in more productive environments. However, there have been few explicit tests of these theories in natural ecosystems. We evaluated the relationship between s...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the water balance in a semi-arid environment with limited in situ data using a remote sensing approach. We focus on the Lake Manyara catchment, located within the East African Rift of northern Tanzania. We use a distributed conceptual hydrological model driven by remote sensing data to study the spatial and temporal variability of water balance parameter...

1. Summer drought stress is considered the primary constraint to plant performance in Mediterranean ecosystems. However, little is known about the implications of summer stress for plant reproduction under real field conditions and, particularly, for the regulatory mechanisms of maternal investment in reproduction. 2. The relationship between plant physiological status at different reproductive...

The growth and yield of crops in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world is driven by the amount of soil moisture available to the crop through rainfall and irrigation. Various methods have been developed for quantifying the soil moisture status of agricultural crops. Recent technological advances in remote sensing have shown that soil moisture can be measured with a variety of remote sensi...