e-ISSN: 1948-6596 https://escholarship.org/uc/fb doi:10.21425/F59235476 Book Review Biologists in deserts Plant Ecology in the Middle East, by Ahmad Hegazy & Jonathan Lovett-Doust, 2016 Oxford University Press, 368 pp. ISBN: 9780199660810 The Biology of Deserts, 2nd edition, by David Ward, 2016 Oxford University Press, 400 pp. ISBN: 9780198732754 What is the great emotional draw of desert envi- ronments? I first encountered the biology of de- serts (or “desserts”, as our undergraduates are wont to write) in 1986. An Egyptian PhD student's scholarship mandated a trip to Egypt at the start of the project to plan the fieldwork. Thus it was that I got to spend ten days travelling about in the South Sinai mountains in the company of a set of young Egyptian students, my introduction to the scientific study of deserts in the shadow of Mt Sinai and the Monastery of St Catherine. It was a magical experience, and I returned raving about how beautiful it was. When my wife came with me a few years later, she was also instantly conver- ted, and we have spent our academic lives in- volved with the ‘howling wilderness’ and its won- derful people. On my return in 1986 I tried to get hold of a textbook on desert biology, and could only find the very old and out-of-date volume 'Biology of Deserts' edited by Cloudsley-Thompson (1954). There was a clear gap in the market. Today we are much better served, and these two recent volu- mes demonstrate it in spades. The first edition of David Ward’s Biology of De- serts was published in 2009 to some acclaim. It is a volume in the Biology of Habitats series of OUP, aimed at igniting the interest of young researchers rather than being a source of reference for spe- cialists. The 2nd edition has more emphasis on land-use changes caused by humans. The book's great strength lies in the way that the author's extensive experience, especially with both Middle Eastern and South African desert systems, under- lies and informs the understanding being commu- nicated. He has set out deliberately to take an evolutionary approach and to integrate Frontiers of Biogeography 2017, 9.2, e35476 knowledge from across all the desert systems of the world. The material is organised as a modern ecology textbook, from individual organisms to ecosystems, with chapters on the abiotic environ- ment, adaptations of both plants and then ani- mals to those abiotic conditions, before moving to considering species interactions in various forms, and ending with desert ecosystems, human im- pacts and the conservation of deserts. The combi- nation of the more traditional description of some of the amazing adaptations of desert organisms with modern ecology's emphasis on species inter- actions, both direct and indirect, is especially effective. The book certainly succeeds in its aim of stimulating interest in desert systems at a fairly straightforward level: I wish it had existed in 1986! However, the literature of today is slightly less well represented than perhaps it might have been. Ward might have included more of a prescription of what needs to be done, rather like the books on aphid ecology that Tony Dixon wrote in retirement -- short, deceptively simple, yet compelling guides to what theory we still lack. In Dixon's wonderful phrase, we need theory to reveal patterns and processes so that we need no longer to record the fall of every apple” (Dixon 2000). Like a reviewer of the first edition, I think an opportunity was missed, for example, to consider processes as functions of aridity gradients. I only found one such plot in the book, the species richness (of ro- dents) versus mean rainfall. It would be very inter- esting to put together all such plots in the litera- ture on 'arid' lands. I have been struck so many times when reading such papers that the arid end of the 'aridity' gradient often starts at values far higher than are ever recorded in Egypt. But then, Egypt is the most arid country in the world! © the authors, CC-BY license