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Desertification is a type of land degradation in drylands in which biological productivity is lost due to natural processes or induced by human activities whereby fertile areas become arid. It is the spread of arid areas caused by a variety of factors, such as climate change and overexploitation of soil as a result of human activity.
Erosion is the action of surface processes that removes soil, rock, or dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust and then transports it to another location where it is deposited. Erosion is distinct from weathering which involves no movement. Removal of rock or soil as clastic sediment is referred to as physical or mechanical erosion; this contrasts with chemical erosion, where soil or rock material is removed from an area by dissolution. Eroded sediment or solutes may be transported just a few millimetres, or for thousands of kilometres.
The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for 900,000 square kilometres (350,000 sq mi), covering much of Botswana, as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa.
Soil erosion is the denudation or wearing away of the upper layer of soil. It is a form of soil degradation. This natural process is caused by the dynamic activity of erosive agents, that is, water, ice (glaciers), snow, air (wind), plants, and animals. In accordance with these agents, erosion is sometimes divided into water erosion, glacial erosion, snow erosion, wind (aeolean) erosion, zoogenic erosion and anthropogenic erosion such as tillage erosion. Soil erosion may be a slow process that continues relatively unnoticed, or it may occur at an alarming rate causing a serious loss of topsoil. The loss of soil from farmland may be reflected in reduced crop production potential, lower surface water quality and damaged drainage networks. Soil erosion could also cause sinkholes.
Nick Middleton is a British physical geographer and supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He specialises in desertification.
David S. G. Thomas is a British scientist and geographer. He was born at his parents' home in River, near Dover, Kent, UK, in October 1958. He is Professor of geography at the University of Oxford, the fifth person to hold the Statuary Chair, and a Professorial Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.
Andrew Shaw Goudie is a geographer at the University of Oxford specialising in desert geomorphology, dust storms, weathering, and climatic change in the tropics. He is also known for his teaching and best-selling textbooks on human impacts on the environment. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of forty-one books and more than two hundred papers published in learned journals. He combines research and some teaching with administrative roles.
Sir Ronald Urwick Cooke, FRGS DL is a professor of geography and geomorphology who was vice-Chancellor of the University of York from 1993 to 2002.
Amos Frumkin is an Israeli geologist and speleologist.
Drylands are defined by a scarcity of water. Drylands are zones where precipitation is balanced by evaporation from surfaces and by transpiration by plants (evapotranspiration). The United Nations Environment Program defines drylands as tropical and temperate areas with an aridity index of less than 0.65. One can classify drylands into four sub-types:
Michael Mortimore was a British geographer and a prolific researcher of issues in the African drylands. He was an academic in Nigerian universities for over 25 years. He ran a British research consultancy, Drylands Research. He is best known for an anti-Malthusian account of population-environment relationships, More People, Less Erosion, and field-based studies of adaptation to drought.
Andrew Warren is a British physical geographer. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London, UK.
Marie Morisawa was an American geomorphologist. Morisawa was an integral part of the revolution in the field that began in the 1950s. She studied the geomorphology of rivers, active fault zones, plate tectonics, coastal geomorphology, geological hazards, and environmental geomorphology.
Lindsay C. Stringer is a Professor in Environment and Development at the University of York.
Alfred Thomas Grove, known more commonly as Dick Grove, was a British geographer and climatologist. He was Emeritus Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge and a Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. Grove researched Environmental Issues and Policy and the landscape change in southern Europe and Climate change and desertification with a focus on Africa and southern Europe. He was awarded the Busk Medal in 1982 for his field work in Africa.
Boshra Salem is a professor, founder and the Chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Alexandria University in Alexandria, Egypt. She is president of Unesco's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) International Coordinating Council (ICC) and serves on the International Council for Science (ICSU)'s Committee for Scientific Planning & Review. She has received a number of awards, including being recognized as an outstanding female scientist in the Women in Science Hall of Fame by the Embassy of the United States in Cairo, Egypt.
Caroline King-Okumu is an international development opportunities manager for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. She was formerly a senior researcher for the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Her major areas of research are dryland ecosystems, economic and environmental assessment, and climate change. She is considered an international expert on land and water management, particularly drylands agriculture. King-Okumu is based in Kenya but is involved in research and projects throughout the world.
Climatic geomorphology is the study of the role of climate in shaping landforms and the earth-surface processes. An approach used in climatic geomorphology is to study relict landforms to infer ancient climates. Being often concerned about past climates climatic geomorphology considered sometimes to be an aspect of historical geology. Since landscape features in one region might have evolved under climates different from those of the present, studying climatically disparate regions might help understand present-day landscapes. For example, Julius Büdel studied both cold-climate processes in Svalbard and weathering processes in tropical India to understand the origin of the relief of Central Europe, which he argued was a palimpsest of landforms formed at different times and under different climates.
Michael Edward MeadowsFAAS FRSSAf is a British-South African Emeritus Professor of physical geography at the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, University of Cape Town.
