Essential links

Arid Land and Desert Regions Research Institute

A. Ecology of Arid Regions Research Center: Arid and semi-arid regions cover one third of the Earth’s area and have limited precipitation. Two third of Iran’s area is covered by arid and semi-arid regions. Destruction of natural resources due to increase of the population and industrial development has disturbed sustainability and requires appropriate planning. On the other hand, it is impossible to use natural resources without recognizing the relationship between animate and inanimate factors. 
B. Water and Environment Refinement: Environmental protection is an obvious issue in the modern societies and execution of any project needs necessary knowledge and awareness about its environment and pollutants. The kind creator of the nature has been hosting us on the Earth for thousands of years and all the creatures obey the nature system except human beings that try to ignore the rules of nature and do the reverse. Considering the rapid growth of the population and promotion of the living standards, human has increasingly needed water. We need to use the most economic and efficient methods to increase the quality of drinking water, wastewater treatment and waste management to meet the needs of the modern societies. Environmental pollutions have increased along with the increase of the population and industries . 
C. Forest and Watershed: Forest is a piece of land covered mainly with trees, shrubs, or other rough age sand herbaceous plants with the area of at least 0.5 hectare and canopy of 5%. Some of the benefits of tree are: producing oxygen, absorbing dust and carbondioxide and other kinds of chemical gases, preventing the penetration of noise and intensification of sound pollution in the cities. Forests, that cover 8.8% of Iran’s area, are divided into two parts from managerial point of view namely, North forests and non-North forests. North forests are in Hyrcanian and Khazari regions and non-North forests are in four other regions. 

D. Human Desertification Control and Desertology: Life is more threatened and limited in deserts comparing to other ecosystems and this violent face is the result of climate poverty or the geological position. That is to say the generation of deserts during the history of the earth is a natural reaction to the severe geographical conditions and has millions years of history. Desertification, as defined by the authentic scientific and international associations, is apparently impalpable phenomenon, which means reducing the production capacity of the lands which is far more dangerous than just converting lands to deserts and is crucially affected by the human activities. In other words, desertification doesn’t mean the invasion of deserts to other types of lands but productivity decrease in general. Desertification is affected by environmental and human factors. The climate agent in the environmental factor includes such parameters as inappropriate time and amount of precipitation, rapid evaporation, high velocity and amount of wind, short return period and continuous drought, extensive arid regions, and the geological agent has such parameters as salty, alkaline, evaporative and susceptible-to-erosion formations and natural disasters including earthquake, flood, etc. The above mentioned are the causes of desertification. Determination of indices and criterions is the first step to stop desertification which aims to create the most realistic evaluation of desertification as well as prevention processes. Following national arid region management policy mentioned in Iran’s 20-year vision plan, Iran is one of the most successful countries in desertification and wind erosion control.