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Deserts experience a wide range of temperatures and weather conditions, and can be classified into four types: hot, semiarid, coastal, and cold. Hot deserts experience warm temperatures year round, and low annual precipitation. Low levels of humidity in hot deserts contribute to high daytime temperatures, and extensive night time heat loss.
The North American Deserts include both cold and hot deserts, which supply a variety of climates. Due to this fact, they are often used for agricultural, business, or petroleum purposes. These factors have been taking a toll on the desert climate, organisms, and landscape. These deserts are the Mojave, Sonoran, Chihuahuan and the Great Basin.
Cold deserts, sometimes known as temperate deserts, occur at higher latitudes than hot deserts, and the aridity is caused by the dryness of the air. Some cold deserts are far from the ocean and others are separated by mountain ranges from the sea, and in both cases, there is insufficient moisture in the air to cause much precipitation.
A satellite image of the Sahara, the world's largest hot desert and third largest desert after Antarctica and the Arctic. Desert greening is the process of afforestation or revegetation of deserts for ecological restoration (biodiversity), sustainable farming and forestry, but also for reclamation of natural water systems and other ecological systems that support life.
The average annual precipitation in low latitude deserts is less than 250 mm. Relative humidity is very low – only 10% to 30% in interior locations, and even the dewpoints are typically very low, often being well below the freezing mark. Some deserts do not have rainfall all year round, they are located far from the ocean.
The Stenocara beetle, which lives in the Namib desert, climbs sand dunes when the humid wind is blowing from the ocean to access the ambient water. [8] An example of plants adapting to the fog desert's climate is the genus Welwitschia which also grows in the Namib desert and grows only two leaves through its life. The leaves have large pores to ...
An example of ecological diversity on a global scale would be the variation in ecosystems, such as deserts, forests, grasslands, wetlands and oceans. Ecological diversity is the largest scale of biodiversity, and within each ecosystem, there is a great deal of both species and genetic diversity. [1] [2] [3] [4]
The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range in the western United States.The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey.