Fawzy M Salama
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Biol Syst Open Access
North African-Indian desert Province known as the Saharo-Sindian Province encompasses the great desert from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the deserts of Sind, Punjab and South Afghanistan. The air is extremely dry, temperatures are high, rainfall is low, salty ground is abundant and the vegetation is uniform. The desert ecosystem in South Africa from a phytogeographical point of view may be due to its position which is located in the intersection of the different phytogeographical regions: Mediterranean, Irano-Turanian, Sudano- Zambezian and the Saharo-Arabian region. This may reflect the relatively rich floristic diversity of this desert. African desert (The greater part of Egypt belongs here) known also as the Sahara, but recently it has become usual to divide the entire desert region of North Africa into Libyan (on the east) and Saharan (on the west) sections. The Libyan portion of the Sahara is now called the Western Desert of Egypt. In this respect the Western Desert contrasts with its neighbor, the Eastern Desert, where landscape is characterized by several wadis. It is a rocky plateau dissected by a number of wadis. Each wadi has a main channel with numerous tributaries. Water availability is not the only restrictive factor for plant growth in the arid and semi-arid zones; nutrients are also usually scarce, and the excess of solar radiation is often an important additional source of stress for plants in these ecosystems. Combination of drought, high temperature and irradiation imposed a complex of stresses on seed germination, seedling establishment and plant survival in arid habitats.
