Accurate and reliable drought monitoring is essential to drought mitigation efforts and reduction of social vulnerability. A variety of indices, such as the standardized precipitation index (SPI), are used for drought monitoring based on different indicator variables. Because of the complexity of drought phenomena in their causation and impact, droughtmonitoring based on a single variable may b...

Drought stress is a common adverse environmental condition that seriously affects crop productivity worldwide. Due to the complexity of drought as a stress signal, deciphering drought tolerance mechanisms has remained a major challenge to plant biologists. To develop new approaches to study plant drought tolerance, we searched for phenotypes conferred by drought stress and identified the inhibi...

...................................................................... viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1 Background: Economics of Drought Is Underresearched ..................................................................... I Scope an...

The changes in a population of springbok confined to a paddock on a farm in the Karoo were ob­ served for 12 years. The observations and data on the age structure, obtained from skulls in the paddock, were used to construct a model of the population changes over the first 10 years. In the 11th year the population was severely depleted as a result of drought. Possible reasons for the magnitude o...

Introduction Disasters due to floods, drought, fires, tsunamis, landslides and biological hazards could intensify their magnitude due to historical, social, economic, political and environmental factors. A significant feature of today’s disaster risk reduction process is that it does not take environmental imbalances into account and neither the co-existing hazards nor their likeliness to gener...

Climate change is harming human health, and the magnitude of the harm is increasing. This is especially true in tropical and subtropical regions that are vulnerable to greater intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme weather, such as hurricanes, drought, and increases in heat, as a result of climate change. Nearly all countries situated in the geographic tropics are poor, and therefore hav...

The 2012 drought was one of the most extensive drought events in half a century, resulting in over USD 12 billion in economic loss in the United States and substantial indirect impacts on global food security and commodity prices. An important feature of the 2012 drought was rapid development and intensification in late spring/early summer, a critical time for crop development and investment pl...

Evaluating nitrate-N fluxes from agricultural landscapes is inherently complex due to the wide range of intrinsic and dynamic controlling variables. In this study, we investigate the influence of contrasting antecedent moisture conditions on nitrate-N flux magnitude and dynamics in a single agricultural watershed on intra-annual and rainfall-event temporal scales. High temporal resolution disch...

Drought reduces plant productivity, induces widespread plant mortality and limits the geographic distribution of plant species1–7. As climates warm and precipitation patterns shift in the future8,9, understanding the distribution of the diversity of plant drought tolerance is central to predicting future ecosystem function and resilience to climate change10–12. These questions are especially pr...