Water has become increasingly scarce in northwestern China due to climate change, economic growth and burgeoning population. Improving agriculture water use efficiency is of strategic significance in promoting socio-economic water productivity for arid and semi-arid inland river basins. Based on the household-level data collected in Zhangye City, which is located in the middle reaches of Heihe ...

[1] Dozens of large, low‐gradient alluvial fans are present within impact crater basins on the cratered highlands of Mars. The timescales and climate conditions that were required to generate such fans are unknown, but testable through our understanding of terrestrial hill slope erosion in the presence of precipitation. Previous estimates of fan formation time vary from years to millions of yea...

Groundwater plays a vital role in the arid inland river basins, in which the groundwater management is critical to the sustainable development of area economy and ecology. Traditional sustainable management approaches are to analyze different scenarios subject to assumptions or to construct simulation–optimization models to obtain optimal strategy. However, groundwater system is time-varying du...

Cohen, A. S., 1989. Facies relationships and sedimentation in large rift lakes and implications for hydrocarbon exploration: examples from lakes Turkana and Tanganyika. Palaeogeogr., Palaeoclimatol., Palaeoecol., 70: 65-80. Two African lakes, Turkana and Tanganyika, illustrate a spectrum of sediments and facies architectures which can occur in large rift lacustrine basins. They demonstrate cont...

Species pool hypothesis is broadly known and frequently tested in various regions and vegetation types. However it has not been tested in the arid Xinjiang region of China due to lack of data. Here with systematic data from references and field survey, we comprehensively examined species pool hypothesis in this region. Took species richness in 0.1° × 0.1° grid cells as regional species richness...

Theoretically derived distributions allow the detection of dominant runoff generation mechanisms as key signatures of hydrologic similarity. We used two theoretically derived distributions of flood peak annual maxima: the first is the ―IF‖ distribution, which exploits the variable source area concept, coupled with a runoff threshold having scaling properties; the second is the Two Component-IF ...

divided into three major areas: the coast, the central valleys, and the river basins. Rainfall is less than in the Gulf Coast region, averaging from 20 to 60 inches annually. The important indigenous grasses are Hilaria semplei, H. cenchroides, Bouteloua filiformis, B. curtipendula, Cathestecum erectum, C. multifidum, Opixia stolonifera, Heteropogon contortus, Panicum spp., Paspalum spp., E I y...

Semi-arid river basins often rely on reservoirs for water supply. Small reservoirs may impact on large-scale water availability both by enhancing availability in a distributed sense and by subtracting water for large downstream user communities, e.g. served by large reservoirs. Both of these impacts of small reservoirs are subject to climate change. Using a case-study on North-East Brazil, this...

[1] Protecting water resources for expanding human enterprise while conserving valued natural habitat is among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Global change processes such as climate change and intensive land use pose significant threats to water resources, particularly in arid regions where potential evapotranspiration far exceeds annual rainfall. Potentially compounding these sho...

Runoff constitutes one of the major water losses from agricultural fields in semi-arid areas. However, by adopting appropriate soil management practices, the runoff can be harnessed for improving crop yields. The main objective of this study was to quantify rainfall-runoff relationships under in-field rainwater harvesting (IRWH) using simulated rainfall, and to compare these results to those ob...