Understanding landscape conversion is vital for assessing the impacts of ecological and anthropogenic disturbances at regional and global scales. Since rangelands cover nearly half of the global land surface, and because a large part of rangelands is located in semi-arid ecosystems, they serve as critical land cover types for determining regional biodiversity, global biogeochemical cycles, and ...

Passive restoration depending on native shrubs is an attractive approach for restoring desertified landscapes in semi-arid sandy regions. We sought to understand the relationships between spatial patterns of native shrubs and their survival ability in sandy environments. Furthermore, we applied our results to better understand whether passive restoration is feasible for desertified landscapes i...

Rangelands are expansive, unimproved lands located in arid or semi–arid regions, spanning a variety of landscapes including savannahs, high and low altitude deserts, mountain meadows, and tundra. Rangelands are generally unsuitable for crop production due to aridity, topography, and extreme temperatures. Rangelands support varying mixtures of native and nonnative grasses, grass–like plants, for...

Federal land management agencies provide stewardship over much of the rangelands in the arid and semi-arid western United States, but they often lack data of the proper spatiotemporal resolution and extent needed to assess range conditions and monitor trends. Recent advances in the blending of complementary, remotely sensed data could provide public lands managers with the needed information. W...

The development of agriculture and industry and the increase of population in countries with arid to semi-arid climates have led to more harvesting of groundwater resources and as a result land subsidence in different parts of the worlds. Decades of groundwater overexploitation in the Kashmar-Bardaskan plain in the north-east of Iran has resulted substantial land subsidence in this plain. The p...

Information on carbon stock and flux resulting from land-use changes in subtropical, semi-arid ecosystems are important to understand global carbon flux, yet little data is available. In the Tamaulipan thornscrub forests of northeastern Mexico, biomass components of standing vegetation were estimated from 56 quadrats (200 m2 each). Regional land-use changes and present forest cover, as well as ...

Livestock production by transhumance rearing systems is the major land use and a source of livelihood in most areas of the arid, semiarid, and arid temperate agro-ecological zones of Asia. It is perhaps the best way of exploiting these pastures economically. Lack of feed is the major constraint to improving livestock production during winter and early spring, as the temperatures are extremely l...

The overall goal of this study is to develop remote sensing desertification indicators for drylands, in particular using the capabilities of imaging spectroscopy (hyperspectral imagery) to derive soil and vegetation specific properties linked to land degradation status. For this purpose, a hyperspectral (field and remote sensing) monitoring program was established in the Natural Park Cabo de Ga...

Contrary to wetlands or moderate climates, the understanding of carbon exchange between ecosystem and atmosphere in arid and semi-arid environments is more challenging due to the sensible feedback of terrestrial ecosystems to environmental variability. Especially in the savannah regions of South Africa the biomes are strongly affected on the one hand by low and sporadic precipitation and on the...

Tongyu County in Northeast China is highly prone to land degradation due to its fragile physical settings characterized by a flat topography, a semi-arid climate, and a shallow groundwater table. This study aims to determine the causes of land degradation through detecting the long-term trend of land cover changes. Degraded lands were mapped from satellite images recorded in 1992 and 2002. Thes...