Biocrusts play a crucial role in maintaining soil health and ecosystem sustainability, but they are currently under assault. Human activities including agriculture, urbanization, and off-road vehicle ...

Prolonged droughts followed by sudden bursts of rainfall -- how do desert soil bacteria manage to survive such harsh conditions? This long-debated question has now been answered by microbiologists.

Desert soil isn’t dead; it’s waiting for the right conditions to come back to life. People around the world are restoring ...

Soil is more than just dirt; it contains many nutrients and microorganisms that maintain the foundation of an ecosystem. In arid and semi-arid climes, soils have biocrusts, which are communities of ...

The foundation of any happy garden is the soil. In fact, some might argue that a gardener’s job isn’t to grow plants but to cultivate healthy soil. In our desert, we are lucky to have plenty of ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A UC Riverside-led study in the Mojave Desert, Calif., has found that soils under “desert pavement” have an unusually high concentration of nitrate, a type of salt, close to the ...

A study from researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev reveals that desert soils can emit powerful greenhouse gases within minutes of being wetted—even in the absence of microbial life.