The Measurements of Desertification Essay example

Today, there is less than half of Australian’s arid zone environment used for farming. Majority of the farming in the arid zone of Australia is for either sheep or cattle, with only a few small, irrigated crops scatted throughout the area (Kaul 1971). As a result, this report will focus on other countries such as North, South and Central America, Africa and Asia (Creswell & Martin 1998). (Please note, Asia’s arid zones are known as a ‘dry zones’, but for this report the generally term ‘arid zone’ will be used).

This is where grasses begin to shorten, and desert shrubs become evident. Studies show that the precipitation is pretty low, ranging from 1.5 inches(38mm) per year in the west to 0.4 inch (10mm) annually in the east. (Petrov) There are two main reasons cause this area aridity. First, within the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer, it receives much sun radiation, so the air is heated and rise. Approaching the mid-latitude around 39° N, air descends, and subtropical high pressure belt results. That is to say, high pressure brings considerable sunshine, hot summer weather, and very little precipination. The great desert of the world, such as Sahara, Kalahari, and Great Victory Desert, are distributing around subtropical high belts. In the Northern Hemisphere, wind veers toward the right of the direction of travel, which is the Coriolis effect. These prevailing winds blow from the west to the east called westerlies. Taklamakan Desert lies in the leeward slope of the Himalayas, they block a mass of warm, moist air from the Indian Ocean, thus enhances rain shadow

Now, humans have a steady food supply so they do not have to move about. Therefore, people use fences to keep their animals in one place, which causes overgrazing. Today we see many subjects being affected by desertification. Ute Schaeffer reports the affects of desertification in, Down to Earth: News & Views on Desertification,“(doc.3) It has presented a challenge for governments and aid agencies in over 110 countries for some time, and is a contributing factor in poverty and regional conflicts, for example in Sudan. It has also been a major issue in Egypt, where 90% of the country’s land mass is desert. Faced with a rising population, the government has had to undertake a number of settlement and irrigation projects to create additional living and working space.” Necessary changes were made in order to adapt to the conditions of the desert and the obstacles that have to be faced. It is always presumed that there are only negative aspects to deserts but this isn’t always the case. There is a side to the Sahara desert that acts as a home to several living organisms. The Sahara has vegetation and access to water, which allows life to exist in this region. The Nile Valley, for example, is an area that is still quite full of foliage, trees and other growing things. This area is an exception, because of the way it is fed by the Nile River. Another area of the Sahara that has some vegetation to it is in the North, along the Mediterranean where olive trees grow

The aim is to identify and associate landforms, rock types and soils to the natural environment and its plants and animals and also to investigate the history of the local environment, comprising human impacts over the last 50 years. The impact of human alterations to the environment includes increased soil erosion and changes in river flows.

While reading through the Document Based Question I found out that Desert’s can be identified by their past, present, and future. Desert’s have been around for a long time. “ Did not begin until the 7th century” (Doc 2). This shows that Desert’s have been a thing in society since the 7th century. Desert’s have been around for over millions of years. “ The arid Sahara may have existed at least 7 million years ago.” (Internet). This shows how long Desert’s truly have been around for. To recapitulate, Desert’s can be identified by their past details, present details, and future

However, many of the worlds irrigation systems are found in arid, semi arid environments, which climate change will alter significantly in the future (J. D, Connor, Schwabe, K. King, D. Knapp, K. 2011). Nearly one third of the worlds Nearly one-third of the irrigated land worldwide are affected by salinization (Schwabe et al., 2011e).

When looking at our recent investigation in the North West of Wales along the coastline, we specifically looked at the sand dunes in Harlech. We were looking at the how vegetation varied the further we go away from the sea, we predicted that we would see a larger proportion of vegetation the further we went from the sea as it is more suitable environment for vegetation to go and the only species present at the start would be the pioneer species of marram grass. There are many risks associated with this investigation and they will be outlined further in this essay.

Droughts are a natural occurrence that has been around for millions of years. Droughts are unpredictable; no one can tell when they are going to take place, the severity, or how long they will last. Impacts on of a drought can send shockwaves thought the region. The economy, agriculture, the environment, and the residents of the region are all affected. (Vicente-Serrano, Beguería, & López-Moreno, 2009, p.1696)

Oceania region is a main victim of the over grazing as it’s 11.3% of land degradation out of 13%. In Europe, 9.8% of the lands less productive because of deforestation whereas 3.3% over cultivation affected in North America.

The project is located at an elevation of ~730 m above mean sea level and within the Basin and Range physiographic province (BR). The BR is composed of high relief mountains or foothills separated by low-lying valleys and salt flats. The salt flats of the Amargosa do not support plant life, but Phreatophytes (deeply rooted plants) occur on their edges and near the adjacent gravel-dominated alluvial fans. Iodine bush (Allenrolfea occidentalis) grows closet to the salt flats, while saltgrass (Distichlis stricta) and arrowweed (Pluchea sericea) occur more distal. The dominant species in the salt flat-proximal areas is honey mesquite (Prosopis juliflora) that occurs as large stands. Sacatone grass (Sporobolus airoides) and desert holly (Atriplex hymenelytra) intergrown with

Biomes are large areas or regions of the earth that inhabit diverse groups of plants and animals, who’ve adjusted to the climate and weather of their native ecosystem. People need to understand that the eight biomes are fragile to human interference. When humans pollute, cut, and do other harmful actions to a biome, it can cause the irreversible damage that leads to the entire biome collapsing. It’s important to understand that biomes are valuable parts of the earth that should be left alone or else there will be large consequences on the animals and plants within them.

In this article GIS is used see how variables such as precipitation and temperature have on the vegetative growth of the coffee tree. This experiment, or similar experiments can be applied to many different types of plants all over the world, to help them better understand how certain things such as climate change will affect many of the world’s important crops. This can for instance be done on citrus fruits, with only a few minor tweaks to the structure of this research experiment, to assess how temperature and precipitation will affect their production as well. This article shows how delicate some organisms in the world are, it shows that climate change can potentially wipe out all of the coffee trees in the world in a fairly short amount of time. This study also demonstrated that precipitation and temperature of the soil have a great impact on coffee yield and that coarse resolution data care able to monitor vegetative variances such as coffee yield (Brunsell, 2013.pg 302).

A.The Sahara Desert is the world‘s extremely hot climate areas. Also the Sahara Desert is the harshest climate. To my knowledge The Sahara Desert gets less than 10 percent each year 10 percent of rainfall each year in the sahara desert and the rainfall and the water doesn’t stay very long in the summertime because it drys up and evaporation. In The summer, the Sahara Desert’s temperature gets around 136 degrees fahrenheit, the temperature might drop depending on the day could drop down 40 degrees fahrenheit during the evening time. Well I believe that the Sahara Desert is at mid-latitude area, because around the mid-latitude area it is very hot and steamy in the Sahara Desert. Well the amount of rainfall will be evaporated from how hot the desert is.

Desertification is a term few people recognize and even fewer are concerned about. This paper will cover what desertification is along with why it is a global crisis, what the root causes of desertification are, what can be done to reverse the harm full desertification process, it will also cover how farmers can work together to prevent future desertification.

MEditerranean Desertification And Land USe (MEDALUS) project is one of the largest project of the European Comission established to analyse the global and regional climate changes. The MEDALUS model (Kosmas et al.1999) identifies regions that are environmentally sensitive area (ESAs). In this model, different types of ESAs to desertification can be analysed in terms of various parameters such as landforms, soil, geology, vegetation, climate, and human actions. Each of these parameters is grouped into various uniform classes and a weighting factor is assigned to each class. Then four layers are evaluated: soil quality, climate quality, vegetation quality, and management quality. As outlined by Kosmas et al. (1999) and Brandt et al. (2003), the method should be reasonably simple, robust and widely applicable; the selection of parameters to assess environmental quality must be made attending to their availability, economy and ability to update and the system should be adaptable to the development and refinement of the existing information content and the possible addition of new information. The principal innovation which was brought in to the study by Kirkby et al. (1998) in their study of MEDALUS was long term interactions with the vegetation and soil, with implications for the way in which the surface flow and infiltration are described and distributed area wise. The model contains four inter-related sub-models for the atmosphere, vegetation, soil and