Soil water is one of limiting ecological factors for vegetation restoration and succession in arid and semiarid regions.The presence of bio-logical crust on sandy soils limits water infiltration depth and reduces water availability for deep-rooted plants;meanwhile

the biological cover can affect greatly the spatial variability and redistribution of soil water.It is therefore necessary to apply proper disturbance on the crust to promote ecological restoration and rehabilitation.It may also be important to address the influences of biological crust on soil evaporation

which is a major part of soil water loss after natural rainfalls.In this study

soil evaporation features were studied after remo-val disturbance and sand burial disturbance on biological crust in a sandy soil of the Loess Plateau

China

which experiences severe criss-crossing water and wind erosion.The results show that removal of the crust did not effectively reduce soil moisture evaporation compared with control(p>0.05)

while sand burial significantly decreased soil evaporation(p<0.01).Soil evaporation was increasingly reduced with the sand bed thickness.The sand burial depth of 20mm had the greatest inhibitive effect on soil evaporation reduction

and the cumulative evaporation was reduced by 58.15%at the end of the experiment.There was no significant difference between 5mm and 10mm sand burial depths (p>0.05)

which reduced soil evaporation by 25.20%and 28.29%

respectively.The findings show that sand burial disturbance has positive effects on conserving soil water in the study area .