Literature Reviews

Review on the climate in Dhofar and in Oman in general
Read the review here.

Review on cloud forests
The annual precipitation in the Dhofar region is small (100 to 220mm per year), about a fifth of the average precipitation in mid-latitude climates that support forests. However, surrounded by dessert small stripes of forests are flourishing nevertheless during the monsoon season.
It appears that the plants have adapted in order to use cloud water as an additional water source to rainfall. This process of cloud harvesting is called horizontal precipitation. And forests, which receive a substantial amount of their water through clouds, are commonly called cloud forests. Worldwide many of those cloud ecosystems have already been identified. Recently researchers have shown much interest in these fragile and diverse ecosystems because they are deemed very sensitive to already small climate changes. A short literature review about cloud forests in general was therefore included to this web page.

Read the review here.