Biological soil crusts are common in many arid and semi-arid regions and they can alter microenvironments which are likely to directly and indirectly influence vascular plant establishment. The effect ...

Prolonged droughts followed by sudden bursts of rainfall -- how do desert soil bacteria manage to survive such harsh conditions? This long-debated question has now been answered by microbiologists.

LOGAN, Utah — Salts are naturally occurring, soluble minerals in areas where soil evaporation and plant water use (or transpiration) are both high and precipitation is low. In that scenario, dissolved ...

The sands of the desert are an important and forgotten storehouse of carbon dioxide taken from the world’s atmosphere, scientists heard today (Wednesday 2 April 2008) at the Society for General ...

In the arid regions of the American Southwest, an unseen world lies beneath our feet. Biocrusts, or biological soil crusts, are communities of living organisms. These industrious microbes include ...

Desert soil has a living crust that is essential for fixing nitrogen, a critical plant nutrient, and for avoiding erosion that produces a swirl of itinerant dust. When the crust is damaged, dust ...

Scientists have made important improvements to our understanding of how water moves through and gets stored in dry desert soils by refining an existing computer model. Several years ago, while ...

From above, it looks like the fur of a big cat. Vegetation and barren land array to form tiger stripes and leopard spots in the dry landscape surrounding Niamey, Niger. These types of patterns are ...