ï»?span class="bldBlack">The desert road
As a new road makes its way along the Sharqiya desert coast, it promises to open up the area to tourism. While everyone has the right to enjoy the desert, we must ensure that development must be kept to a sustainable equilibrium with the local ecosystem and people.

ï»?span class="bldBlack">Around the world
Deserts are characterised by dry climate and extremes of temperature. Not surprisingly, plant and animal life is scarce in this habitat type. Though it is easy to imagine deserts as hot places, it can get very cold in the night. Some deserts, like the Gobi Desert and Antarctica, are always cold. Deserts cover about a fifth of the Earth's area. Rainfall in deserts varies, from about half an inch to over 12. The driest deserts are the Atacama in Chile and Lut in Iran. Here, less than half an inch of precipitation occurs annually, and from condensed fog rather than rain. Patterns of wind and the 'rainshadow' effect are usually responsible from blocking moisture-laden winds from reaching deserts. The dryness gives rise to daily temperature variations. Lack of moisture in the air heats up the ground very fast in the daytime. Once the sun sets, the absorbed heat escapes equally fast and temperatures drop drastically.

ï»?span class="bldBlack">The desert woodlands
Refer to Oman Today July 2005 for our exploration of the desert woodlands, and our lead feature in this issue too.

Our GPS waypoints will get you through the woodlands, full of the legendary tree prosopis cineraria, which the Bedouin call ghaf. The amazing thing is that it is the only tree you will find in most of the Sharqiya Sands, rising straight out of sand, not soil.

Surveying the sands
In the late 1980s, the Oman Wahiba Sands Project was undertaken by the Royal Geographical Society and Omani agencies, in the desert region now called the Sharqiya Sands.

Botanists identified over 130 different plants in the area, about four times more than they'd expected. Added to this were an estimated 16,000 invertebrates and even evidence of early lithic activity dating back 7,000 years. Three species of lichen were found, a possible food source for Arabian gazelle. Beneath the larger ghaf trees, up to 20 species of surface vegetation were recorded.

The grey monitor lizard was found to burrow under the roots, while Ruppell's foxes, sand cats and the white-tailed mongoose were found in the woodlands. Several reptile species were recorded, along with a staggering 87 species of birds and some very interesting little inhabitants like the water-basking beetle that collects surface water at dawn and later burrows up to 20cm into the sand.