Maize is widely grown in Africa including in drier areas where alternate crops will often perform better. Although maize will fail in drought years, it produces substantially higher yields than alternates, such as sorghum and millet, in wet years. Although people tend to select which crops to grow based on recent experience with crop harvests and prices, there is a widespread preference for mai...

This paper analyses monthly differences in drought impact on vegetation activity in a semi-arid region in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula between 1987 and 2000. The study determines spatial differences in the effects of drought on the natural vegetation and agricultural crops by means of the joint use of vegetation indexes derived from AVHRR images, a drought index (standardized precipi...

Running head: 1 Hydrogen, stomatal closure and drought tolerance 2 3 Authors: 4 Yanjie Xie, Yu Mao, Wei Zhang, Diwen Lai, Qingya Wang, Wenbiao Shen 5 6 Address: 7 1 College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China 8 2 Laboratory Center of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 9 210095, China 10 11 *Corresponding author 12 Wenbiao Shen 13 College...

Drought is one of the most important environmental constraints limiting plant growth and agricultural productivity. To understand the underlying mechanism of drought tolerance and to identify genes for improving this important trait, we conducted a gain-of-function genetic screen for improved drought tolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana. One mutant with improved drought tolerance was isolated and ...

In recent decades, various kinds of remote sensing-based drought indexes have been proposed and widely used in the field of drought monitoring. However, the drought-related software and platform development lag behind the theoretical research. The current drought monitoring systems focus mainly on information management and publishing, and cannot implement professional drought monitoring or par...

Drought is by far the most costly natural disaster that can lead to widespread impacts, including water and food crises. Here we present data sets available from the Global Integrated Drought Monitoring and Prediction System (GIDMaPS), which provides drought information based on multiple drought indicators. The system provides meteorological and agricultural drought information based on multipl...

High salinity and drought are the major abiotic stresses that adversely affect plant growth and agricultural productivity. To investigate genes that are involved in response to abiotic stresses in Brassica napus, a comprehensive survey of genes induced by high-salinity and drought stresses was done by macroarray analysis. In total, 536 clones were identified to be putative high-salinity-or drou...

Drought stress is a recurring feature of world climate and the single most important factor influencing agricultural yield worldwide. Plants display highly variable, species-specific responses to drought and these responses are multifaceted, requiring physiological and morphological changes influenced by genetic and molecular mechanisms. Moreover, the reproducibility of water deficit studies is...

Climate change significantly impacts the vegetation growth and terrestrial ecosystems. Using satellite remote sensing observations, here we focus on investigating vegetation dynamics and the likelihood of vegetation-related drought under varying climate conditions across China. We first compare temporal trends of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and climatic variables over China. W...