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"Botany Kuwait"
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A comparative study of remote sensing classification methods for monitoring and assessing desert vegetation using a UAV-based multispectral sensor
Restoration programs require long-term monitoring and assessment of vegetation growth and productivity. Remote sensing technology is considered to be one of the most powerful technologies for assessing vegetation. However, several limitations have been observed with regard to the use of satellite imagery, especially in drylands, due to the special structure of desert plants. Therefore, this study was conducted in Kuwait’s Al Abdali protected area, which is dominated by a
Rhanterium epapposum
community. This work aimed to determine whether Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) multispectral imagery could eliminate the challenges associated with satellite imagery by examining the vegetation indices and classification methods for very high multispectral resolution imagery using UAVs. The results showed that the transformed difference vegetation index (TDVI) performed better with arid shrubs and grasses than did the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). It was found that the NDVI underestimated the vegetation coverage, especially in locations with high vegetation coverage. It was also found that Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) classifiers demonstrated a higher accuracy, with a significant overall accuracy of 93% and a kappa coefficient of 0.89. Therefore, we concluded that SVM and ML are the best classifiers for assessing desert vegetation and the use of UAVs with multispectral sensors can eliminate some of the major limitations associated with satellite imagery, particularly when dealing with tiny plants such as native desert vegetation. We also believe that these methods are suitable for the purpose of assessing vegetation coverage to support revegetation and restoration programs.
Journal Article
The Function of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi Associated with Drought Stress Resistance in Native Plants of Arid Desert Ecosystems: A Review
Drought stress profoundly affects native desert plants’ survival and performance. Among all the abiotic stresses, drought is considered a major constraint that influences the structure and functions of desert ecosystems. Arid desert ecosystems are characterized by prolonged drought, extreme temperatures, high solar radiation, water scarcity, high salinity, scarcity of soil nutrients, and poor soil structure. Such extreme desert environments are the toughest regions on earth, which present enormous challenges in conserving plant survival, growth and reproduction. Despite the predominance of these environmental conditions, native desert plant species that grow in desert environments develop complex adaptation strategies and resistance mechanisms to ameliorate the abiotic and biotic stresses in the extreme environments including changes in biochemical, physiological, and morphological levels. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) form positive symbiotic associations with a considerable percentage of terrestrial plants as their host, induce distinct impacts on plant growth and protect plants from abiotic stresses. However, it is necessary to advance our understanding of the complex mechanisms associated with AMF-mediated and other dark septate endophytes (DSE)-mediated amelioration of native desert plants’ drought stress resistance and associated biological adjustments such as changes in hormone balance, water and nutrient status, stomatal conductance and osmotic adjustment, antioxidant activity, and photosynthetic activity. This review provides an overview of the relationships of mycorrhiza and fungal endophytes involved in drought stress tolerance, summarizing the current knowledge and presenting possible mechanisms mediated by AMF to stimulate drought tolerance associated with native desert plants. We discuss the research required to fill the gaps and provide suggestions for future research.
Journal Article
Assessment of plant diversity of endemic species of the Saharo-Arabian region in Egypt
Savanna, semi-deserts, and hot deserts characterize the Saharo-Arabian region, which includes Morocco, Mauretania, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, southern Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India. Its neighboring regions, the Sudano-Zambezian region belonging to the Paleotropical Kingdom and the Mediterranean and Irano-Turanian regions included in the Holarctic Kingdom, share a large portion of their flora with the Saharo-Arabian region. Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the region’s global importance for plant diversity, an up to date list of the Saharo-Arabian endemics is still unavailable. The available data are frequently insufficient or out of date at both the whole global and the national scales. Therefore, the present study aims at screening and verifying the Saharo-Arabian endemic plants and determining the phytogeographical distribution of these taxa in the Egyptian flora. Hence, a preliminary list of 429 Saharo-Arabian endemic plants in Egypt was compiled from the available literature. Indeed, by excluding the species that were recorded in any countries or regions outside the Saharo-Arabian region based on different literature, database reviews, and websites, the present study has reduced this number to 126 taxa belonging to 87 genera and 37 families. Regarding the national geographic distribution, South Sinai is the richest region with 83 endemic species compared with other eight phytogeographic regions in Egypt, followed by the Isthmic Desert (the middle of Sinai Peninsula, 53 taxa). Sahara regional subzone (SS1) distributes all the 126 endemic species, Arabian regional subzone (SS2) owns 79 taxa, and Nubo-Sindian subzone (SS3) distributes only 14 endemics. Seven groups were recognized at the fourth level of classification as a result of the application of the two-way indicator species analysis (TWINSPAN) to the Saharo-Arabian endemic species in Egypt, i.e., I
Asphodelus refractus
group, II
Agathophora alopecuroides
var.
papillosa
group, III
Anvillea garcinii
group, IV
Reseda muricata
group, V
Agathophora alopecuroides
var.
alopecuroides
group, VI
Scrophularia deserti
group, and VII
Astragalus schimperi
group. It’s crucial to clearly define the Saharo-Arabian endemics and illustrate an updated verified database of these taxa for a given territory for providing future management plans that support the conservation and sustainable use of these valuable species under current thought-provoking devastating impacts of rapid anthropogenic and climate change in this region.
Journal Article
Using phytoremediation by decaying leaves and roots of reed (Phragmites austrates) plant uptake to treat polluted shallow groundwater in Kuwait
Phytoremediation is the use of plants and their associated microorganisms, to remove or degrade biochemically the pollutants from the soil and groundwater environment. It is an emerging technology for water/soil/agricultural remediation, which offers a low-cost flexible technique suitable for use against a number of different types of contaminants in a variety of media. This research illustrates that this technology can be used to reduce the concentration of pollutants in Kuwait shallow groundwater to improve the efficiency of irrigation for greenery purposes. The investigation of this research was carried out through using reed plants in two experiments: First in decaying reed leaves and the second in reed roots. The change in the concentration of the inflow of the polluted groundwater and the outflow of the treated irrigation water was measured in the laboratory for chemical analysis. The two experiments indicated the ability of the reed plants to reduce the concentration of salt ions (Cl, Na, K, and SO4) by about 66–78%. Roots reduced the total dissolved solid values by 66%, the plants were capable of reducing the concentration of nitrogen compounds significantly, and fluoride was reduced by ≈ 86% while the roots removed the lithium significantly. This research illustrates that the roots of the reed plants are capable to reduce the heavy metals of Cd, Co, Zn, and Fe significantly. The reduction of Al, Cu, and Cr by the roots of the reed plants was 53%, 39%, and 89% respectively. These results provide a preliminary indication that reed plants have the capability to remove pollutants at various levels and that salinity can be reduced considerably to improve irrigation efficiency in Kuwait.
Journal Article
The Use of Very-High-Resolution Aerial Imagery to Estimate the Structure and Distribution of the Rhanterium epapposum Community for Long-Term Monitoring in Desert Ecosystems
The rapid assessment and monitoring of native desert plants are essential in restoration and revegetation projects to track the changes in vegetation patterns in terms of vegetation coverage and structure. This work investigated advanced vegetation monitoring methods utilizing UAVs and remote sensing techniques at the Al Abdali protected site in Kuwait. The study examined the effectiveness of using UAV techniques to assess the structure of desert plants. We specifically examined the use of very-high-resolution aerial imagery to estimate the vegetation structure of Rhanterium epapposum (perennial desert shrub), assess the vegetation cover density changes in desert plants after rainfall events, and investigate the relationship between the distribution of perennial shrub structure and vegetation cover density of annual plants. The images were classified using supervised classification techniques (the SVM method) to assess the changes in desert plants after extreme rainfall events. A digital terrain model (DTM) and a digital surface model (DSM) were also generated to estimate the maximum shrub heights. The classified imagery results show that a significant increase in vegetation coverage occurred in the annual plants after rainfall events. The results also show a reasonable correlation between the shrub heights estimated using UAVs and the ground-truth measurements (R2 = 0.66, p < 0.01). The shrub heights were higher in the high-cover-density plots, with coverage >30% and an average height of 77 cm. However, in the medium-cover-density (MD) plots, the coverage was <30%, and the average height was 52 cm. Our study suggests that utilizing UAVs can provide several advantages to critically support future ecological studies and revegetation and restoration programs in desert ecosystems.
Journal Article