Drought is an intermittent disturbance of the water cycle that profoundly affects the terrestrial carbon cycle. However, the response of the coupled water and carbon cycles to drought and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we provide the first global synthesis of the drought effect on ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE = gross primary production (GPP)/evapotranspiration (ET)). Usin...

Application[Editor 321]  of biotic growth regulators (e.g. humic components) and appropriate mulches is recommended to improve turfgrass quality especially in arid andsemi-arid climate zones. However, limited number of studies have investigated their effect on lawn establishment. To investigate the effect of humic acid (HA) and selected mulches on characteristics of Festuca arundinacea in its p...

The arid region is spread over 38.7 million hectares mainly in the states of Rajasthan. Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh besides cold arid region situated in Leh, Laddakh and Himachal Pradesh. The region is marked by extreme environmental constraints due to which the cultivation of traditional crops is not economical. In a situation such as this, arid horticulture has ample s...

estimated effective precipitation (pe) in dryland areas is an essential element of water resource management. itrepresents the amount of precipitation available in the crop root zone to meet the needs of evapotranspiration. thecurrent study compared different approaches for estimating pe in different climatic zones of iran. a two-layer soil–water balance (swb) model was adopted based on the pro...

Visual obstruction as a method to quantify herbaceous biomass in southern African semi-arid savannas Dave Joubert, Larkin A Powell & Walter H Schacht To cite this article: Dave Joubert, Larkin A Powell & Walter H Schacht (2015) Visual obstruction as a method to quantify herbaceous biomass in southern African semi-arid savannas, African Journal of Range & Forage Science, 32:3, 225-230, DOI: 10.2...

We construct a state-and-transition model for mammals in tropical savannas in northern Australia to synthesize ecological knowledge and understand mammalian declines. We aimed to validate the existence of alternative mammal assemblage states similar to those in arid Australian grasslands, and to speculate on transition triggers. Based on the arid grassland model, we hypothesized that assemblage...

During the summer months, wet (hyporheic) soils associated with ephemeral streams and lake edges in the Antarctic Dry Valleys (DVs) become hotspots of biological activity and are hypothesized to be an important source of carbon and nitrogen for arid DV soils. Recent research in the DV has focused on the geochemistry and microbial ecology of lakes and arid soils, with substantially less informat...