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Desertification is a gradual process of increased soil aridity.Desertification has been defined in the text of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as "land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities."
Historic desertification is the study of the desert-forming process from a historic perspective. It was presumed in the past that the main causes of desertification lay in overuse of the land resulting in impoverishment of the soil, reduced vegetation cover, increased risk of drought and the resulting wind erosion. However recent projects to ...
Evaporites are found in the US's Great Basin Desert, historically exploited by the "20-mule teams" pulling carts of borax from Death Valley to the nearest railway. [105] A desert especially rich in mineral salts is the Atacama Desert, Chile, where sodium nitrate has been mined for explosives and fertilizer since around 1850. [105]
The term Great American Desert was used in the 19th century to describe the part of North America east of the Rocky Mountains to approximately the 100th meridian. [2] It can be traced to Stephen H. Long's 1820 scientific expedition which put the Great American Desert on the map. [3] [4]
Desertification is the process by which a piece of land becomes a desert, as the word desert implies. [3] The loss or destruction of the biological potential of the land is referred to as desertification. [4] It reduces or eliminates the potential for plant and animal production on the land and is a component of the widespread ecosystem ...
The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range in the western United States.The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey.
Desert ecology is the study of interactions between both biotic and abiotic components of desert environments. A desert ecosystem is defined by interactions between organisms, the climate in which they live, and any other non-living influences on the habitat. Deserts are arid regions that are generally associated with warm temperatures; however ...
There are three main deserts in California: the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Desert, and the Great Basin Desert. [5]: 408 The Mojave Desert is bounded by the Tehachapi Mountains on the northwest, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains on the south, and extends eastward to California's borders with Arizona and Nevada; it also forms portions of northwest Arizona.