The first programme looks at the Coast of Loneliness, a desert-bordered coastal area providing a home to a rich diversity of wildlife, including springbok, seals, rats and big cats.
The second programme in the five-part series is about the desert along West Africa's Skeleton Coast. The desert has its first rain for two years and within a few hours, it bursts into life with new vegetation, insects, birds and lizards taking advantage of the moisture.
The wind brings both food and moisture to the desert's residents, ranging from vegetation lizards to the nara plant, a relative of the cucumber, that forms the basic diet for many creatures of the dunes.
For more than a decade, Des and Jen Bartlett filmed a small population of elephants. During the driest months, the herd relies on water that collects beneath Namibia's Hoanib and Hoarusib River beds, and sometimes the animals have to travel for days in order to find sufficient food.
Two researchers live with a tribe of baboons for four years on the parched bed of the Kuiseb River, where temperatures reach 45°C and there is no rainfall for 116 days.
