-PDF Download- Drylands EBOOK

Drylands

Author: Thea Astley

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 2018-04-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 192562661X

This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian

The Drylands

Author: Mary Rosenblum

Publisher: Del Rey

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780345380388

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration

Author: David A. Bainbridge

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2012-09-26

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9781610910828

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Dryland degradation and desertification now affect almost a billion people around the world. Tragically, the biological resources and productivity of millions of acres of land are lost to desertification each year because people remain unaware of strategies and techniques that could improve yields, reduce risk, and begin healing the world's deserts. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration is the first book to offer practical, field-tested solutions to this critical problem. Author David Bainbridge has spent more than 25 years actively involved in restoring lands across the American Southwest. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration presents the results of his years of fieldwork, as well as research and experience from scientists and practitioners around the globe. The book discusses the ecology of desert plants, explores the causes of desertification and land abuse, and outlines the processes and procedures needed to evaluate, plan, implement, and monitor desert restoration projects. It sets forth economical and practical field-tested solutions for understanding site characteristics, selecting and growing plants, and ensuring that they survive with a minimal amount of water and care. Each chapter represents a guide to a critical topic for environmental restoration; extensive photographs, diagrams and drawings give detailed information for immediate application, and additional resources are included in appendixes. A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration is the first comprehensive book focused on restoring arid regions, and clearly demonstrates that arid lands can be successfully rehabilitated. In addition to restorationists, the book will be an invaluable resource for anyone working in arid lands, including farmers, ranchers, gardeners, landscapers, outdoor recreation professionals, and activists.

Dryland Ecohydrology

Author: Paolo D'Odorico

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-01-09

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9781402042591

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Ecohydrology emerges as a new field of research aiming at furthering our understanding of the earth system through the study of the interactions between the water cycle and vegetation. By combining the analysis of biotic and abiotic components of terrestrial ecosystems, this volume provides a synthesis of material on arid and semiarid landscapes, which is currently spread in a number of books and journal articles. The focus on water-limited ecosystems is motivated by their high sensitivity to daily, seasonal, and decadal perturbations in water availability, and by the ecologic, climatic, and economic significance of most of the drylands around the world. Conceived as a tool for scientists working in the area of the earth and environmental sciences, this book presents the basic principles of eco-hydrology as well as a broad spectrum of topics and advances in this research field. The chapters collected in this book have been contributed by authors with different expertise, who work in several arid areas around the World. They describe the various interactions among the biological and physical dynamics in dryland ecosystems, starting from basic processes in the soil-vegetation-climate system, to landscape-scale hydrologic and geomorphic processes, ecohydrologic controls on soil nutrient dynamics, and multiscale analyses of disturbances and patterns.

The nature of drylands : diverse ecosystems, diverse solutions

Author:

Publisher: IUCN

Published:

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 2831711118

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Drylands Facing Change

Author: Angela Kronenburg García

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1000802566

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as ‘wastelands’ and their ‘backward’ inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland’s point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied. This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Current Insights in Drylands

Author: Niall Patrick Hanan

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2024-04-05

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 283254696X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

We are now entering the third decade of the 21st century, and recent drylands-focused research has led to major advances in our understanding of the coupled roles of climatic, edaphic, biotic, and anthropogenic processes in dryland ecosystem function, degradation, and sustainable management. Frontiers has organized a series of Research Topics to highlight the latest advancements in science in order to be at the forefront of science in different fields of research. This editorial initiative, led by Professor Niall Hanan, Specialty Chief Editor of the Drylands section, together with Dr. Lindsay Hutley, is focused on new insights, novel developments, current challenges, latest discoveries, recent advances, and future perspectives in the drylands field.

Trees, forests and land use in drylands: the first global assessment

Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 9251319995

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Drylands cover 41 percent of the Earth's land surface. This publication presents the results of the first global assessment of trees, forests and land use in these lands. The assessment breaks new methodological ground: it relies on the visual interpreation of freely available satellite images, carried out by more than 200 experts in a series of regional workshops. Using a tool called Open Foris ollect Earth, developed by FAO in collaboration with Google, participants gathered and analysed information for mrore than 200 000 sample plots worldwide. For each region, the report summarizes the distribution of forests, other wooded land and other land uses including grasslands, croplands, built-up areas and barren land, across all drylands and by aridity zone. It also estimates tree canopy cover, shrub cover, forest type and presence of trees outside forest. Indicatng that the global drylands contain more than one-quarter of the world's forest area, and that trees are present on 31 percent of the world's dryland area, the report provides a baseline for future monitoring and will support countries in their efforts to identify appropriate investments for the restoration and sustainable management of drylands.

Valuing, restoring and managing “presumed drylands”: Cerrado, Miombo–Mopane woodlands and the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau

Author: Haddad, F.F., Blicharska, M., Westerberg, V., Riccardi, T., Costa, L.

Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.

Published: 2022-05-13

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 925136222X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The study "Valuing, restoring and managing presumed drylands: Cerrado, Miombo–Mopane woodlands and the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau" confirms the existence of 1 075 million hectares of presumed drylands that are under threat from unsustainable use and climate change. This is in addition to the 6.1 billion hectares of official drylands that already cover 41 percent of the planet’s land surface and are home to 2 billion people. All these areas contain high levels of biodiversity and are home to a large number of people reliant on agriculture to sustain their livelihoods, this is why it's so important to research, analyse and work to protect them. The report contains concrete information on the environmental and ecological value of these dryland areas, and key recommendations for actions to limit land degradation, sustain biodiversity and mitigate climate change.

Confronting Drought in Africa's Drylands

Author: Raffaello Cervigni

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 146480818X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Drylands are at the core of Africa’s development challenge. Drylands make up about 43 percent of the region’s land surface, account for about 75 percent of the area used for agriculture, and are home to about 50 percent of the population, including a disproportionate share of the poor. Due to complex interactions among many factors, vulnerability in drylands is high and rising, jeopardizing the long-term livelihood prospects for hundreds of millions of people. Climate change, which is expected to increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, will exacerbate this challenge. African governments and their partners in the international development community stand ready to tackle the challenges confronting drylands, but important questions remain unanswered about how the task should be undertaken. Do dryland environments contain enough resources to generate the food, jobs, and income needed to support sustainable livelihoods for a fast growing population? If not, can injections of external resources make up the deficit? Or is the carrying capacity of drylands so limited that outmigration should be encouraged? Based on analysis of current and projected future drivers of vulnerability and resilience, the report uses an original modeling framework to identify promising interventions, quantify their likely costs and benefits, and describe the policy trade-offs that will need to be addressed. By 2030, economic growth leading to structural change will allow some of the people living in drylands to transition to non-agriculture based livelihood strategies, reducing their vulnerability. Many others will continue to rely on livestock keeping and crop farming. For the latter group, a number of “best bet†? interventions have the potential to make a significant difference in reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience. This report evaluates the opportunities and challenges associated with these interventions, and it draws a number of conclusions that have important implications for policy making.