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natural environment > arid environment > desert

Preferred term

desert  

Definition

  • A desert is an area of land where rainfall is rare and scarce, and where, as a result, living conditions are hostile for plants and animals. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface to the process of denudation. The world's deserts can be classified according to the amount of precipitation they receive, the prevailing temperatures throughout the year, the causes of desertification or their geographical location. The only thing that all the world's deserts have in common is that they are extremely dry, or more precisely, that they are arid, which means that they receive little or no rainfall. Semi-arid and arid areas cover about one third of the Earth's surface. This includes much of the polar regions where little precipitation occurs, often referred to as 'cold deserts'. There are considerable variations of desert and semidesert ecosystems on different rock and soil conditions. To many environmental scientists—and to the layman—what actually defines a desert is the vegetation cover rather than the climate. Plant growth in relation to the available moisture is affected by soil type, underlying lithology, slope angle, and aspect. It is also affected by grazing intensity and the history of land use. Although not generally discussed, what constitutes a “desert” or “semidesert” is often confusing because of regional differences in the usage of the words. In North America, the term “desert” is often used to refer to scrublands which are dense enough to sustain commercial ranching and which would probably not even be regarded as semidesert in many regions. However, other areas within the American southwest are indeed sparse enough to be regarded as “semidesert” by most standards. The Australian “deserts” are almost all densely vegetated enough to be regarded as “semideserts” by the standards used in other areas, such as the Sahara. (Adapted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert and E. Lioubimtseva & J. M. Adams (2004). Environmental Management, 33, S388-S404.)

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