As drought ravages the vast and barren expanse of northern Kenya, decimating livestock and displacing hundreds of pastoralist communities, rather than stay in the settlements, the men have opted to salvage whatever little livestock is left by scouring the arid ranges of northern Kenya and sometimes southern Somalia in search of water and pasture.
This species' once wide-scale semi-arid range has been heavily disturbed by predation from feral pests (e.g. foxes and dingoes) and extensive land clearing for pasture development for livestock grazing to the point that it is threatened by extinction.
Changing the vegetation from woody shrubs to grass in Arizona decreased the amount of run-off and increased the carrying capacity, and the authors comment "considering the large amount of semi-arid range land areas of the world, of which the pre-treatment area was typical, such range land conversion can have a tremendous impact on the agricultural and economic output". (Simanton et al. 1977).
Indeed, for all its obvious negatives, fire was part of the life cycle of the arid western range long before humans settled the region and tried to tame the land, instinctively suppressing wildfires whenever possible.
Based on changes in soil structure, horizons, root traces, and geochemical trends, these paleosols record a gradual change from humid, forested conditions of the late Eocene to more seasonal, semi arid, open range conditions leading up to the global climatic deterioration event of the early Oligocene at 33.2 Ma.
Today a low, arid, mountain range (∼300 m high) runs north-south along the spine of the tropical Cape Range peninsula (80 kms by 20 kms) (Fig. 2), fringed on the western and northern sides by the Ningaloo Coral Reef.
This is rugged country: harsh, broken deserts, arid mountain ranges, towering peaks cloaked in pine and aspen, and, in winter, deep snows.
The second largest town is Alice Springs, located in the arid MacDonnell Ranges in the southern part of the territory, close to the Tropic of Capricorn.
The semi arid Flinders Ranges of South Australia contain abundant remnants of fine-grained late Pleistocene valley fills.
A river along the semi-arid Front Range of Colorado was monitored for antibiotics including five tetracycline and six sulfonamide compounds.
