Soil information, including their spatial variability is vital for devising various soil and land management policies and strategies as well as assessing the environmental impact of different land use changes. Among the various soil forming factors, terrain plays a vital role in determining the spatial distribution of soil properties especially in hilly terrains due to its impact on soil processes as well as the redistribution of soil materials. The study was carried out for assessing the applicability and efficiency of various terrain parameters for prediction as well as spatial mapping of different soil properties using Random Forest (RF) modeling approach, in a mid-Himalayan watershed located in Tehri Garhwal district, Uttarakhand. Field data collection was done by collecting soil samples from 0-15cm depth (surface layer) at 68 different locations in the study area, following a transect survey method. Collected samples were pre-processed and analyzed in the laboratory for estimating various soil properties such as sand, silt and clay contents as well as soil nutrients such as Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) and nitrogen (N). Fifteen terrain parameters derived by digital terrain analysis of CartoDEM of 10m spatial resolution were used as predictor variables during RF modeling. Pearson correlation analysis revealed poor linear relationship of soil properties with various terrain parameters. Variable importance ranking revealed that compound topographic index, elevation, heat load index, integrated moisture index and mean curvature are the most important variables, explaining maximum variability in different properties. The performance of RF models for predicting various soil properties were evaluated based on the coefficient of determination (R²), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) as well as Lin’s Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC). The models were found to perform well with R² and CCC values of 0.47 and 0.50 for sand, 0.52 and 0.55 for silt, 0.44 and 0.57 for clay, 0.41 and 0.36 for organic carbon and 0.55 and 0.34 for nitrogen, respectively. The validated models were further employed for generating the spatial distribution maps of various soil properties. Such attempts combining various environmental variables with machine learning based models may aid us in mapping the spatial distribution of various soil properties in the hilly mountainous terrains with considerable accuracies.

The scarcity of water resources presents the most threatening risk and its effects are beginning to affect several regions of the planet. It cannot be denied that Morocco, due to its location in the south of the Mediterranean, has been affected by these climatic trends of which the plateau de Sais offers a good example by its location in the center of the country and by its wealth of superficial and groundwater resources. In recent decades, this plateau has experienced water stress, particularly in its groundwater reserves. It has been manifested by the decrease in flows from several springs or even total drying up in particular after successive periods of unusual drought, which marked the whole of the country after the 1980s. It is in this perspective this study aims to understand the behavior of the hydrogeological functioning of the springs located in the plain of Fez and its middle Atlas borders. Its geological complexity, as well as the abundance of carbonate rocks and the presence of volcanic basalt flowing from South to North have favored the resurgence of several springs of different flows and with a hydrological regime influenced according to the years and seasons by rainfall inputs. All these physical factors as well as human intervention on the hydrosystem through hydro-agricultural activities influence the behavior of the hydrological functioning of these springs.

The book under review ‘Feminist Daughters with Military Fathers: The Forgotten Legacy of Rural Berber Men’ by Fatima Sadiqi is a tribute to the author’s military father and his service to the Moroccan French and Moroccan military. The book also covers various themes such as military sociology, gender and culture throughout five chapters such as in chapter one about a biography of sadiqi’s Mouhamd ou Lahcen (around 1919-2005) a rural, illiterate, self-made Berber man who served in the French army before joining the Moroccan army after independence in 1956. Chapter two is dedicated to the sociology of the military. Chapter three offers an understanding of the intersection between gender and the military and also highlights the important role of Moroccan women in the national struggle for independence. Chapter four examines the nature of the Moroccan Military institution and its history. Chapter five contains life stories and experiences of twenty-five Moroccan Feminist leaders in various fields. Journalists, university professors, medical doctors, and writers that are of Sadiqi’s generation who have similar backgrounds being “daughter of military fathers” and “often share rural background”.

Many female Arab writers have chosen poetry as the most efficient and esthetically most gratifying medium for expressing the discourse of liberation and influence that they are leading. The present paper discusses the new poetic devices adopted by various women poets, from the use of shocking titles to the creation of unusual devices for communication between reader and poem. In this study, we focus on three poems by three women poets and compare the role that verbal esthetics play in promoting the concept of liberation and influence in them. The first poem is ‘Taḥaddin’ (Challenge) by the Algerian poet Aḥlām Mustaghāminī (b. 1942). In it, language appears as an instrument for a discourse of liberation in face of great challenges: politics, society, the writer herself. The poet uses such traditional devices as harmonizing intertexuality and functional rhyme to construct her vision. The Iraqi poet Wafā Abd al-Razzāq (b. 1952) in her ‘Waqfāt’ (Pauses) takes symbols out of their usual context and deprives them of their evocative power in the reader’s mind, enabling her to use them to create images of her own vision of women composers of poetry. Maysūn Ṣaqr (b. 1958) of the United Arab Emirates expresses redemption through the act of writing by using meta-linguistic esthetic constructions such as écart, contrasting intertextuality and enjambement that shatter the meaning. All three poems use devices that are similar to those used by male Arab poets in modern times, the poetesses have succeeded in giving these devices a feminine coat unique to them. The difference lies in the mode of their use: 1) clearly hearing the feminine first person, 2) allusions to children’s voices, masks and stories, and 3) biographical tales whose protagonists are women, all of which are rarely to be found in the writings of male poets.