As the world warms, will humans evolve to cope with arid conditions? Maybe, if the Yoruba people of west Africa are anything to go by.

Emissions of African dust increased sharply in the early 1970s, but the human contribution to land degradation and dust mobilization remains poorly understood. Now, a 3,200-year record of dust deposition off northwest Africa has been constructed.

The economic activities in Nigeria clearly show that over 60 percent of the population are engaged in agriculture for their livelihoods directly or indirectly. However overtime especially in

Desertification is the process of land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry-subhumid areas. This communication describes the classification system, methodology and the results of desertification and land degradation status mapping carried out for the entire country on 1 : 500,000 scale using multi-temporal
Resourcesat AWiFS data.

Trees and shrubs grew in the Sahara between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago, suggesting wet spells may have helped early humans as they left Africa.

Free-ranging horses (Equus caballus) in North America are considered to be feral animals since they are descendents of non-native domestic horses introduced to the continent. We conducted a study in a southern California desert to understand how feral horse movements and horse feces impacted this arid ecosystem.

In arid environments such as deserts, nitrogen is often themost limiting nutrient for biological activity. The majorityof the ecosystem nitrogen flux is typically thought to be drivenby production and loss of reactive nitrogen species by microorganismsin the soil.