The agricultural landscapes of Nebraska reflect a complex pattern of soil climate regimes and inherent variability that influence the cropping systems, behavior of farmers, and the health and sustainability of rural communities. The USDA crops and soils databases were coupled with the Enhanced Newhall Simulation Model (ENSM) to explain spatial relationships of soil climate regimes, climatic shi...

Future Opportunities and Challenges in Remote Sensing of Drought Brian D. Wardlow, Martha C. Anderson, Justin Sheffield, Brad Doorn, Xiwu Zhan, Matt Rodell, and Others National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University National Aeronautics and Spa...

[Drought indicators are proliferating, but with little consideration of which are most meaningful for describing drought impacts. A number of recent reviews compare different drought indicators, but none assess which indicators are actually used in the many operational drought monitoring and early warning efforts, why they were selected, or whether they have been ‘ground-truthed’, i.e., compare...

Different drought indices often provide different diagnoses of drought severity, making it difficult to determine the best way to evaluate these different drought monitoring results. Additionally, the ability of a newly proposed drought index, the Process-based Accumulated Drought Index (PADI) has not yet been tested in United States. In this study, we quantified the severity of 2012 drought wh...

Trehalose-6-phosphate synthase (TPS), as the key enzyme for the synthesis of plants trehalose, has effects of enhancing its anti-dehydration, as well as protecting biofilm, proteins, and others from harm. Additionally, reproductive isolation between species can be broken with transgenic technology, and beneficial gene of other species can be transformed and utilized to improve resistance of cro...

In this research Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) in a period of 22 years(1990 to 2011) was used for zoning of climatic and agricultural drought in South Khorasanprovince, Iran. Rainfall data of six synoptic stations were collected and used for evaluationof meteorological drought. Also, reports of some local offices such as natural resources,agriculture, regional water and environment dep...

The standard suite of indicators currently used in operational drought monitoring reflects anomalous conditions in several major components of the hydrologic budget—representing deficits in precipitation, soil moisture content, runoff, surface and groundwater storage, snowpack, and streamflow. In principle, it is useful to have a diversity of indices because drought can assume many forms (meteo...

Cimarron County, Oklahoma and Union County, New Mexico, neighboring counties in the Southern High Plains, are part of a vital agricultural region in the United States. This region experiences extended periods of cyclical drought threatening its ability to produce, creating an incentive for extensive center pivot irrigation (CPI). Center pivots draw from the rapidly depleting High Plains Aquifer...

Existing drought indices have been widely used to monitor meteorological drought and agricultural drought; however, few of them are focus on drought monitoring for grassland regions. This study presented a new drought index, the Grassland Drought Index (GDI), for monitoring drought conditions in global grassland regions. These regions are vital for the environment and human society but suscepti...

ICARDA and ICRISAT are nonproft international agricultural research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). They focus on sustainable agricultural development for the dryland poor. They also convene a global, multi-institutional partnership known as the Desertification, Drought, Poverty and Agriculture Consortium (DDPA) to provide research con...