Arid climate

In the past hundred years, the meanings of the word "landscape" have shown great diversity, especially in the context of cities and geographies. While this diversity contains richness in a way, it also led to the formation of a multi-disciplinary structure. Beyond its rich context, this book deals with many topics in the planning and design dimensions of landscape(s) from today's perspective which carries multilingual characteristic. The chapters in the book discuss the concept of landscape in a wide range of topics such as urban design, green infrastructure, urban vegetation, legislation and green policies, urban agriculture, waste management, urban planning, rural landscape, and cultural landscape.
Basically, the emergence of this book is the gathering of researches made by PhD candidates within the scope of Advanced Landscape Studies course conducted by Bahar Başer Kalyoncuoğlu in Okan University's PhD Program in Architecture.
Thanks to Hussein Alfarhani, who contributed to the creation and editing of the book, and to Chouaib Guerrout, Eneida Haska, Saja Ali Alrawahneh, Othman Al-Masshadani, Modupe Odemakin, Djaber Ahriche, Siham Said, Esra'a Ja'far Hasan Altwassi, who contributed to the content of the book with their valuable researches.
Our intent, furthermore, is to continue the broadening and enrichment of the diverse meanings linked to the concept of landscape to bring the new and current scopes of twenty first century on debate. Especially we need to discuss about landscape more, during these extraordinary days due to Cov-19 Pandemic also breakthroughs in technology and changes in social life. In this context, we hope that this publication also contributes to the updating of the theoretical knowledge infrastructure in the intersection of cities, architecture and landscape.

Variations in morphology, fatty acids, pigments and cyanobacterial community composition were studied in microbial mats across intertidal flats of the arid Arabian Gulf coast. These mats experience combined extreme conditions of salinity, temperature, UV radiation and desiccation depending on their tidal position. Different mat forms were observed depending on the topology of the coast and location. The mats contained 63 fatty acids in different proportions. The increased amounts of unsaturated fatty acids (12–39%) and the trans/cis ratio (0.6–1.6%) of the cyanobacterial fatty acid n-18:1ω9 in the higher tidal mats suggested an adaptation of the mat microorganisms to environmental stress. Chlorophyll a concentrations suggested lower cyanobacterial abundance in the higher than in the lower intertidal mats. Scytonemin concentrations were dependent on the increase in solar irradiation, salinity and desiccation. The mats showed richness in cyanobacterial species, with Microcoleus chthonoplastes and Lyngbya aestuarii morphotypes as the dominant cyanobacteria. Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis patterns suggested shifts in the cyanobacterial community dependent on drainage efficiency and salinity from lower to higher tidal zones. We conclude that the topology of the coast and the variable extreme environmental conditions across the tidal flat determine the distribution of microbial mats as well as the presence or absence of different microorganisms.