Hypotheses about the origin of vegetation pattern formation in semi-arid areas around the world almost all include a common feature of semi-arid areas: the presence of a positive feedback between plant density and water infiltration. We investigate whether this positive feedback and the spatial redistribution of runoff water are sufficient to explain vegetation pattern formation. For this purpo...

The vegetation composition of a post-fke succession in Aleppo pine forests of Anica, Greece, was studied by a synchronic method. The sites form a post-fire chronosequence and have typical Mediterranean climate. Data on the flora of the burned sites, growth and life forms of the various plant taxa, as weU as on vegetation smcture are provided. The burned ecosystems recovered quite rapidly. Durin...

Swains I s l a n d i s an i s o l a t e d a t o l l l y i n g about 270 km n o r t h of Samoa. Although g e o g r a p h i c a l l y and f l o r i s t i c a l l y a p a r t of t h e Tokelau I s l a n d s 160 km t o t h e n o r t h w e s t , i t be longs p o l i t i c a l l y t o t h e T e r r i t o r y o f American Samoa. The i s l a n d l i e s a t a l a t i t u d e of 11°03 ' S and a l o n g i...

This study aims to assess the effect of grazing intensity on vegetation structure, soil nutrient concentrations and soil physical properties. The study was carried out in steppe rangelands of Saveh, Markazi province, Iran. Four sites with four grazing intensities including very high, high, moderate and non-grazed with the same ecological conditions were selected. To study various vegetation and...

Riparian Zones are considered biodiversity and ecosystem services hotspots. In arid environments, these ecosystems represent key habitats, since water availability makes them unique in terms of fauna, flora and ecological processes. Simple yet powerful remote sensing techniques were used to assess how spatial and temporal land cover dynamics, and water depth reflect distribution of key land cov...

Despite recent studies on bio-fuels for carbon mitigation, biomass resource shortages in Japan continue to be a serious concern. To deal with this future problem, we evaluated whether the large amounts of biomass supplied from arid land afforestation in Western Australia could compensate for this biomass resource shortage, by estimating how much biomass as bio-fuel resource could be produced by...

Water scarcity is one of the factors limiting plant growth and development. More than onethird of the global terrestrial ecosystems is located in arid and semi-arid regions. The mostimportant limiting factor for plant growth is water shortage. Drought could significantlychange the natural vegetation cover. Rainfall reduction in Iraq, Turkey and Syria hasreduced vegetation cover so that dust sto...

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 analysis of vegetation dynamics is essential in semi-arid regions, in particular because of the frequent occurrence of long periods of drought. In this paper, multi-temporal series of the Normalized Difference of Vegetation Index (NDVI), derived from SPOT-VEGETATION satellite data between September 1998 and June 2010, were used to analyze the vegetation dynamics over the semi-arid central r...