الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Egypt belongs to drylands of North Africa, including semi-arid province in its Mediterranean coastal belt. Generally, arid-land is the most vulnerable to climatic changes. The future vegetation trend in such arid land can be achieved through scenarios based on the long-term field observations of certain geographic regions. The current work is dealing with the current floristic composition compared to that from the last successive ten decades in the Egyptian desert, to elucidate: the spatial distribution of some indicator species to demonstrate its response to the climatic changes. The results revealed a poleward shift of some indicator Mediterranean and Saharo-Sindian species, in addition to the decline in Mediterranean species number and evenness and notable number and evenness increase in the Saharo-Sindian species. Genetic flexibility in response to the climatic change, of some indicator species (the shrubby Retama reteam and annual Vicia monantha) using Inter Simple Sequence Repeat during the last 4 decades was also be presented. The retrieved molecular variations revealed that the shrub species R. raetam has lower genetic variation than the annual V. monantha in response to the in situ climate change during the period 1976 to 2018. Such a study provides a case study for the effect of climatic changes in arid land vegetation, to support the future climatic scenarios |