Drought stress caused by unpredictable precipitation poses a major threat to food production worldwide, and its impact is only expected to increase with the further onset of climate change. Understanding the effect of drought stress on crops and plants' response is critical for developing improved varieties with stable high yield to fill a growing food gap from an increasing population dependin...

Large-scale tree dieback events are increasing in frequency around the world, with many of them attributed to the effects of climate change-related droughts (i.e., droughts that co-occur with heat stress) (Adams et al. 2010, Allen et al. 2010). As mean global temperatures are expected to rise by 2–4 °C in the next 85 years (Christensen et al. 2007) and elevated temperatures are correlated with ...

Climate science has advanced over decades from an initial focus on the development and use of numerical models of Earth’s climate and compilation of rich networks of observational data, to now being in a position to “detect” and “attribute” specific impacts and events to anthropogenic climate change. Recent analyses have thus established the “fingerprint” of anthropogenic climate change in an i...

Climatic parameters’ modeling is very important in environmental data processing. This is a consequence that climatic parameters vary dramatically in time and space. Moreover, the climate variables are dependent to each other and also to earth surface conditions such as height. The other problem is that climatic parameters are measured as a point based variables in weather stations. However, fo...

The development and implementation of a drought policy is intended to alter a nation’s approach to drought management. A national drought policy should establish a clear set of principles or operating guidelines to govern the management of drought and its impacts. The policy should be consistent and equitable for all regions, population groups, and economic sectors and consistent with the goals...

Introduction More than 90% of South Africa is either arid or semi-arid and drought is a characteristic feature of the climate. Because drought has significant ecological and socio-economic impacts, investigations into its causes, consequences and mitigation have been regularly undertaken in South Africa over the last 100 years. Recent climate change scenarios suggest that there will be an incre...

A key question for climate change adaptation is whether existing cropping systems can become less sensitive to climate variations. We use a field-level data set on maize and soybean yields in the central United States for 1995 through 2012 to examine changes in drought sensitivity. Although yields have increased in absolute value under all levels of stress for both crops, the sensitivity of mai...

Ongoing climate change will lead to more extreme weather events, including severe drought periods and intense drying rewetting cycles. This will directly influence microbial nitrogen (N) turnover rates in soil by changing the water content and the oxygen partial pressure. Therefore, a space for time climate change experiment was conducted by transferring intact beech seedling-soil mesocosms fro...

In recent years, global climate change has altered precipitation patterns, causing uneven spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation that gradually induces precipitation polarization phenomena. Taiwan is located in the subtropical climate zone, with distinct wet and dry seasons, which makes the polarization phenomenon more obvious; this has also led to a large difference between river f...

Climate change affects the abundance, distribution and activity of natural enemies that are important for suppressing herbivore crop pests. Moreover, higher mean temperatures and increased frequency of climatic extremes are expected to induce different responses across trophic levels, potentially disrupting predator-prey interactions. Using field observations, we examined the response of an aph...