_ In conjunction with the poems we talked about above, the ending lines of "Reconstruction" seem to tease out a common thread: And then there was a turning point, he says, a matter of vegetation and scarcity and greed.
From October 2015 to June 2016, Cyprus suffered from very low precipitation combined with extremely high temperatures, leading to severe drought with serious crop failure, forest and vegetation fires and scarcity of water.
Because of the scarcity of vegetation and the common development of impermeable rock layers of various types, runoff in the arid lands tends to be rapid and achieves dramatic and significant results.
The combination of long-term hyperaridity, scarcity of vegetation and lack of bioturbation, salts cementation, dust accumulation and tight desert pavement cover, has protected the surfaces from erosion forming one of the most remarkably stable landscapes on Earth, a landscape that essentially has not eroded, but accumulated salt and dust for more than 106 yr.
There is also a preference for browsers (goats and camels), and a move away from grazers (cattle and sheep), due to changes in vegetation composition and water scarcity.
These environments share common characteristics (scarcity of surface water, desert vegetation, high evapotranspiration, water imbalance, among others).
A similar approach to the one used in this study could be applied to other regions of the world confronted by the same problems of water scarcity along with the need for vegetation restoration.
Salinity, which is a major environmental issue for both arid and semi-arid regions, is highly stressful for vegetation and adds to other stresses including water scarcity, nutrient deficiencies and soil alkalinity.
However, the scarcity of long-term field observations of vegetation in the Sahel prevents ground validation and deeper analysis of such trends.
The analysis of satellite SAR data with PSI techniques poses often problems on sites where, due to the scarcity of human artefacts and the presence of vegetation cover, density of coherent points (PS) is low (< 10 per km2).
For example: in semi-arid vegetation patterns, power-laws are produced by facilitative interactions between plants against water scarcity.
