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Desert tourism has grown steadily in several regions of the world, due to a post-modern fascination with remoteness, barrenness, silence and solitude. This paper evaluates the trend towards tourism development in South Africa's arid Karoo region. It utilises several methodologies – analysis of discourse, demand and supply – to track the changing profile of tourism in the Great Karoo. The paper concludes that the reputation of the Karoo has shifted profoundly from being hostile, dangerous and boring to being attractive, enticing and spiritual. At the same time, tourists are increasingly expressing favourable opinions of the Karoo as a destination, while accommodation facilities are growing apace. The overview also finds that tourism services in some Karoo towns are developing at a much faster rate than others, so the tourism performance is uneven. A survey of tourists in the Karoo found that the arid environment and small-town ambience offer significant attractions, and Karoo guest houses have a positive outlook for the future. These findings suggest that the Great Karoo is indeed in the process of becoming a tourism destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization has brought about dramatic changes in the urban environment in China and its associated human population and transportation systems in recent years. However, urbanization in the oases of arid regions of China has been little studied and remains poorly understood. This paper aims to analyze spatiotemporal changes in an urban landscape along major vehicular road transects and compare the relationship between urban growth and transportation in Jiuquan, an oasis city in an arid region of China. We integrated remote sensing images, landscape metrics, and urban-rural gradient analysis to address these questions. The results showed that major vehicular roads stimulated Jiuquan's urban expansion, especially with regard to built-up land containing urban green land areas. Oasis urbanization not only increased landscape fragmentation and structural complexity, but also followed a linear branching, leapfrogging growth pattern characterized by “axial clumps” extending from downtown into rural areas along the road network. The primary source of urban land was not agricultural land, but unused land. These results also indicated that the transect approach implemented along representative roads was effective for studying the urbanization of oasis cities. Such an approach could be applied to master planning in similar oasis cities throughout arid China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how Borana pastoralists of southern Ethiopia have adapted resource use and livestock mobility practices amid multiple constraints including rising population, loss of rangeland to other pastoral communities and changing access rights, among others. This study uses an innovative multi-scalar methodology to understand how herders' grazing management decisions are made within a context of communal regulations governing access to resources. Grazing itinaries specifying the grazing units used during the past year were established for 91 cattle herds and daily mobility was recorded through 12 months of GPS data monitoring of three herds in three zones within the Borana rangelands. The results revealed communal reorganisation of the grazing areas into units with designated periods of access. Despite the reorganization, herd mobility is severely limited, but to different degrees. In the zones facing most constraints, herd mobility is restricted to the grazing areas within proximity of the respective herder's settlement. However in all the areas, movement outside the herd owners' zone of residence is only practiced as escape mobility, ‘ baqa’ (to flee); instead of the formerly common ‘ godanna’ (to move). These constraints impede fundamental herd mobility needed to meet livestock nutrient requirements, which then affects resilience of the pastoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]