Despite prevailing dry conditions, groundwater-fed lakes are found among the earth's tallest sand dunes in the Badain Jaran Desert, China. Indirect evidence suggests that some lakes are shrinking. However, relatively few studies have been carried out to assess the regional groundwater conditions and the fate of the lakes due to the remoteness and severity of the desert environment. Here we use ...

Excluding grazers is one of most efficient ways to restore degraded grasslands in desert-steppe communities, but may negatively affect the recovery of plant species diversity. However, diversity differences between grazed and fenced grasslands in desert-steppe are poorly known. In a Stipa breviflora desert steppe community in Northern China, we established six plots to examine spatial patterns ...

In desert ecosystems, plant growth and nutrient uptake are restricted by availability of soil nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). The effects of both climate and soil nutrient conditions on N and P concentrations among desert plant life forms (annual, perennial and shrub) remain unclear. We assessed leaf N and P levels of 54 desert plants and measured the corresponding soil N and P in shallow (0-1...

The present study investigates the frequency and intensity of mineral dust emissions over the deserts of eastern Asia from 1996 to 2001. Mineral dust emissions are simulated using a physical dust emission scheme over a region extending from 35.5°N to 47°N and from 73°E to 125°E. The input parameters required by the dust emission model are (1) surface features data including aerodynamic roughnes...

The stability and sustainability of revegetated ecosystems is a central topic in ecological research. In this study, long-term monitoring and focused research on vegetation, soil and soil moisture from 2006 to 2012 were used to develop a model for evaluating indices of ecosystem stability using the analytical hierarchy process method. The results demonstrated that rainfall (R), vegetation cover...

Precipitation is a key environmental factor determining plant community structure and function. Knowledge of how community characteristics and leaf stoichiometric traits respond to variation in precipitation is crucial for assessing the effects of global changes on terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, we measured community characteristics, leaf stoichiometric traits, and soil properties along...

Desert microbes are expected to be substantially sensitive to global environmental changes, such as precipitation changes and elevated nitrogen deposition. However, the effects of precipitation changes and nitrogen enrichment on their diversity and community composition remain poorly understood. We conducted a field experiment over 2 years with multi-level precipitation and nitrogen addition in...

introduction morphological segmentation of land surface is commonly used for land surface allocation in management and environmental sciences. the first step in assigning a piece of land to a specific application is to divide it into homogeneous morphological segments. traditional field-based geomorphological mapping can be time consuming, costly, and challenging when large areas, particularly ...

1 The Remote Sensing Laboratory, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boker Campus, Midreshet Ben-Gurion 84990, Israel; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China; E-Mail: [email protected] 3 Laboratoire d’Optique Atmosphérique, Universi...

Storm event representation and analysis based on a directed spatiotemporal graph model Weibo Liu, Xingong Li & David A. Rahn a Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA b State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, China c Atmospheric Science Program, Department of Geography, Universit...