Talk:Drylands

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 January 2019 and 17 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Floo2019.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:20, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Water Limited Environments

I noticed that the article related to "Water Limited Environments" (WLE) was changed to "Drylands" in the most recent edits. I consider that such change was not appropriate because of the following reasons:

1. WLE is a general category to define lands, ecosystems, or areas where the evapotranspiration highly surpasses the precipitation during the whole year or at specific periods of the year. For example, a Dryland most likely has very low precipitation throughout the year, whereas Mediterranean forests normally have an excess of water in the soil during winter and spring that later in summer, when the climatic conditions change dramatically, are affected by excessive dry conditions (>> evapotranspiration and << precipitation)

2. The low amounts of water in the soil is one of many characteristics of WLE. However, low humidity in the soil is not a strong indicator of water limitation especially if it is not related with a depth reference. Montane forests might have soils with low humidity at 15 to 20 cm but at higher depths they can be saturated with water. Sophisticated adaptations of the vegetation to deal with water limitations or a low soil-water potential depth profile are stronger indicators of WLE conditions.

3. Drylands indeed have very dry soils but are just one specific kind of WLE. I consider that the Drylands' article should be put separately from the WLE article.

Leonardo343 (talk) 11:31, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

External map

An example of the kind of map this article needs: [1] -- Beland (talk) 03:32, 22 August 2016 (UTC)