It has been suggested that white colour is beneficial for snails living in arid environments. In this work, shell coloration in the arid-dwelling land snail Sphincterochila (Albea) candidissima was manipulated during aestivation. Snails painted black lost more body weight than did control ones, presumably as a consequence of higher heat absorption. This suggests that light colour is advantageou...

Arid environment is a dry landscape or region that received an extremely low amount of precipitation. Arid areas are located where vegetation cover is sparse to almost nonexistent. Almost one third of earth land surface is arid or desert. Over desert areas, a number of land cover patterns can be observed. One example is given here for the Arabian Peninsula. The located area can be found in Fig....

The International Arid Lands Consortium (IALC) was established in 1990 to promote research, education, and training activities related to the development, management, and reclamation of arid and semiarid lands in the Southwestern United States, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the world. The Consortium supports the ecological sustainability and environmentally sound stewardship of these lands ...

Land degradation impacts on several critical environmental issues such as food security, diminishing quality and quantity of fresh water resources, preservation of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. Land degradation is responsible for soil erosion and can eventually lead to desertification. The International Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) defines des...

Arid Land Research and Management Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713926000 Soils and Brine Geochemistry and Mineralogy of Hyperarid Desert Playa, Ouargla Basin, Algerian Sahara Belhadj Hamdi-Aissa a; Vincent Valles b; Alain Aventurier c; Olivier Ribolzi d a Université de Ouargla, L. R. de Prot...

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the primary results of the Semi-Arid Land–Surface–Atmosphere (SALSA) Program in the context of improvements to our overall understanding of hydrologic, ecologic, and atmospheric processes and their interactions in a semi-arid basin. The major findings and future research needs associated with the different core components of the program a...

Rapid urbanization has occurred in northwestern China, threatening the sustainability of its fragile dryland ecosystems. A lack of precise urban land-cover information has limited our understanding on the urbanization in the dryland. Here, we examined urban land-cover changes from 2000 to 2014 in 21 major cities that comprise over 50% of the developed land in arid China, using Landsat Enhanced ...

1. Definitions 1.1. Types of Aridity 1.2. Levels of Aridity 2. Paleoperspective 3. People and Land Use in Arid Lands 3.1. Foragers/Hunter–gatherers 3.2. Agriculturists 3.3. Pastoralists 4. Geomorphology of Arid and Semiarid Lands 5. Biological Diversity in Arid Lands 5.1. Arid and Semiarid Lands Plants and their Uses 5.2. The Future of the Conservation of Wild Plants in Arid Regions 6. Climatic...

Improving the capability of land-surface process models to simulate soil moisture assists in better understanding the atmosphere-land interaction. In semi-arid regions, due to limited near-surface observational data and large errors in large-scale parameters obtained by the remote sensing method, there exist uncertainties in land surface parameters, which can cause large offsets between the sim...

The arid zones of the world are all characterized by a large deficit of rainfall in relation to the potential evapotranspiration. Their distribution around the world is governed by the interaction of global atmospheric circulation patterns, the distribution of land and sea, and local topography. Countries that have substantial areas with arid conditions belong to very different groups in terms ...