The growth and yield of many crops, including cotton, are affected by water deficit. Cotton has evolved drought specific as well as general morpho-physiological, biochemical and molecular responses to drought stress, which are discussed in this review. The key physiological responses against drought stress in cotton, including stomata closing, root development, cellular adaptations, photosynthe...

Drought is an increasingly common phenomenon in drylands as a consequence of climate change. We used 311 sites across a broad range of environmental conditions in Patagonian rangelands to evaluate how drought severity and temperature (abiotic factors) and vegetation structure (biotic factors) modulate the impact of a drought event on the annual integral of normalized difference vegetation index...

Global warming has resulted in increasingly frequent and severe drought and/or precipitation events. Severe drought limits crop water availability and impacts agricultural productivity and socioeconomic development. To quantify drought-induced yield loss during the main crop stages in Liaoning province, China, aspects of drought episodes (magnitude, duration, and frequency) were investigated du...

Prunus mongolica Maxim, which is widely established in the Gobi Desert, shows extreme tolerance to drought. However, there is a lack of available transcriptomic resources for this species related to its response to water deficiency. To investigate the mechanisms that allow P. mongolica to maintain growth in extremely arid environments, the response of P. mongolica seedlings to drought stress wa...

Of all recurring natural disasters, long-term drought is one of the most devastating and costly due to large spatial extent and often long duration. The mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of long-term droughts are not well understood, however many drought analyses allege the importance of land-atmosphere feedbacks and speculate that these feedbacks will amplify changes in the hydrologic...

Drought is one of the main factors affecting rice productivity. Aromatic Rice varieties differ in their ability to withstand drought while keeping characteristic fragrance. Considering that 70% of the water used by humankind is directed to irrigate crops, tolerance to water scarcity is also a key issue for agricultural sustainability. The understanding on the mechanisms underlying drought toler...

Drought stress is one of the major yield constraints for cereal crops. Traditionally, for developing drought tolerant cultivars, selection either direct or indirect is practiced. Although this approach is effective, yet time consuming and labour intensive. Identification of drought related quantitative trait loci (QTLs) coupled with marker assisted selection has shown some positive results. Tra...

Drought is a major abiotic stress that is threatening the production and the survival of many crops such as cereals. The response of three Aegilops crassa accessions (C1, C2 and C3) that inhabit areas with different rates of rainfall and durum wheat to controlled drought (with soil moisture of 50% field capacity) was tested in terms of changes in: relative water content, chlorophyll content, ch...

Weather and climate events and agronomic enterprise are coupled via crop phenology and yield, which is temperature and precipitation dependent. Additional coupling between weather and climate and agronomic enterprise occurs through agricultural practices such as tillage, irrigation, erosion, livestock management, and forage. Thus, the relationship between precipitation, temperature, and yield i...

In this study, to improve the efficiency of the original Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI_original), we coupled the Soil and Water Assessment tool (SWAT) and PDSI_original to construct a drought index called PDSI_SWAT. The constructed PDSI_SWAT is applied in the Wei River Basin (WRB) of China during 1960–2012. The comparison of the PDSI_SWAT with four other commonly used drought indices reve...