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Published in:
2007 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
The desert makes the desert: Climate feedbacks from the vegetation of arid zones
Published in: Vegetation-Climate Interaction
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Even in the original state of the world before agriculture, forests occupied only a minority of the earth’s land surface. Much of the world has dry climates that cannot support a tree cover, and their natural vegetation is open grassland, scrub or desert. There is no doubt that the location of these arid zones is largely dictated by broad-scale geography (as we saw in Chapter 1), with several factors tending to produce dry climates.