Deserts, far from being desolate wastelands, are biologically diverse environments with various animals and plants that have adapted to the severe conditions. Some deserts are among the last remaining areas of complete wilderness globally. Despite this, more than one billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population, live in desert areas.
Any large, very dry stretch of ground with very less vegetation is referred to as a desert. It is one of Earth’s major biomes, and it is home to a diverse range of plants and animals that have evolved to live in harsh conditions.
Deserts cover over a fifth of the Earth’s land area and can be found on all continents. A desert is defined as an area with less than 10 inches (25 cm) of annual rainfall. Drylands are a wider set of landforms that includes deserts. These areas have a “moisture deficit,” which means that they lose more moisture to evaporation than they receive through annual precipitation.
The four basic types of deserts are:
The presence of comparable plant species between desert regions shows floral relationships in most situations. Unless humans have introduced them, identical species are unusual in deserts.
In Africa, the ice plant and lily families thrive; in Iran, the cabbage family grows in the Sahara; in the Middle East, the carnation family grows; and in Australia, the myrtle, protea, and casuarina families grow. All of the families are members of regionally significant groupings that have adapted to arid circumstances, and they can also be found in other plant types in the same places.
Other plant families can be found in abundance in desert flora. The chenopod or saltbush family, for example, is abundant in dry and semiarid regions of Australia, North America, and from the Sahara upto Iran, India, and Central Asia but rare in other habitats.
Various animals are found in desert regions, both large and small. Australia is the most distinctive continent, yet it is also the most isolated geographically. In comparison to other areas, the Australian desert fauna is characterised by a large variety of reptiles but few mammals in comparison. This situation is shared to some extent with the South American deserts.
Many Australian mammals are marsupials. Marsupials include kangaroos, wallabies, bandicoots, and the burrowing marsupial mole. Several tiny Australian desert mammals have become uncommon or extinct in recent years. Humans brought the European rabbit, which is now a common mammal in many Australian desert regions.
Most other arid environments are home to various native rabbit and hare species. Camels were introduced into Australia’s deserts and have adapted well.
The Sahara desert is located in northern Africa and occupies around 10% of the continent, covering over 3,500,000 square miles (9,000,000 square kilometres). The Red Sea borders it on the east, and it stretches west to the Atlantic Ocean. The Mediterranean Sea constitutes the northern border of the Sahara Desert. At the same time, the Sahel, an area where the desert environment turns into a semi-arid tropical savanna, defines the southern border.
The Sahara desert has a hot and dry climate. However, it is believed that this great desert landscape underwent several climatic transformations in the last few hundred thousand years. In the previous glacial epoch, precipitation was low, and the desert area was much larger than it is today. Subsequently, due to low pressure over the ice sheets in the north, the amount of precipitation increased from 8000 BCE to 6000 BCE. Still later, the ice sheets started melting, further altering the low-pressure situation in the area. This facilitated the drying up of the northern Sahara, while the southern part remained moist due to the presence of the monsoon.
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