Following a study of large-scale atmospheric and oceanic interactions associated with the recent Northeast drought, smaller-scale manifestations of this drought are studied with the help of records from New York Central Park Observatory. The long-period records of this Observatory (since 1869) are then studied statistically in relation to dry periods. Among the most interesting facts brought ou...

Water channel proteins, aquaporins, play fundamental roles in transmembrane water movements in plants. A new full-length cDNA encoding aquaporin was isolated from the seedlings of Jatropha curcas. The gene of the plasma membrane intrinsic protein (PIP) from J. curcas (JcPIP2) contained an 843 bp open reading frame encoding a protein of 280 amino acids. The amino acid sequence showed 94% identit...

Recent droughts in the midwestern United States threaten to cause global catastrophe driven by a speculator amplified food price bubble. Here we show the effect of speculators on food prices using a validated quantitative model that accurately describes historical food prices. During the last six years, high and fluctuating food prices have lead to widespread hunger and social unrest. While the...

Nicholls and Larsen (2011) demonstrated that daily maximum temperatures at Melbourne, Australia, tended to be higher during and following droughts than otherwise. Studies in Europe and elsewhere also have demonstrated that low soil moisture associated with a drought is a likely contributor to high temperatures (eg. Durre et al. 2000; Seneviratne at al. 2006, 2010; Fischer et al. 2007a, b; Dole ...

Areas affected by land degradation in Sub-Saharan West Africa between 1982 and 2012 are identified using time-series analysis of vegetation index data derived from satellites. The residual trend (RESTREND) of a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series is defined as the fraction of the difference between the observed NDVI and the NDVI predicted from climate data. It has been wid...

Stress and vigor are endpoints on a continuum of the suitability of plants for insect herbivores. Senescence-feeding insects, such as the chrysanthemum lace bug, Corythucha marmorata (Uhler) (Hemiptera: Tingidae, Tingitini), are hypothesized to benefit from any stressor hastening the senescence of plant tissues, such as drought. They are also hypothesized to prefer feeding and ovipositing on st...

A survey on opium use was earned out in Tinsukia district of upper Assam to assess the present prevalence and pattern of opium abuse and compared with earlier findings of the year 1981 (Baruah et al., 1995). A total of 75 addicts could be detected during the survey and 61 were interviewed using structured questionnaire. The results indicate significant decline in prevalence in opium use over th...

Drought is natural and climate phenomenon and in fact server as a part of climate in an area and also it has significant environmental ,social ,and economic consequences .drought differs from the other natural disasters from this viewpoint that it s a creeping phenomenon meaning that it progresses little and its difficult to determine the time of its onset and termination .most of the drought d...

Understanding how resilient rangelands are to climatic disturbances such as drought is of major importance land managers. The resilience ecosystems can be reduced by livestock grazing and environmental conditions. Most studies quantifying based on model simulations. However, natural time series from satellite data offer the possibility infer aspects real systems. objective this study was invest...