Cassava is an important root crop to resource-poor farmers in marginal areas, where its production faces drought stress constraints. Given the difficulties associated with cassava breeding, a molecular understanding of drought tolerance in cassava will help in the identification of markers for use in marker-assisted selection and genes for transgenic improvement of drought tolerance. This study...

Drought is one of the most serious natural disasters in China. Drought disasters occur frequently and caused huge economic loss in recently. In this paper, a drought prediction model based on weighted Markov Chain is put forward. An application is demonstrated by Anhui province of Huaihe River in China. Based on the precipitation data during 1958-2006 at monthly scale, the different time scales...

It is well-known that drought has considerable effects on plant traits from leaf to ecosystem scales; however, little is known about the relative contributions of various traits within or between tree species in determining the plant's sensitivity or the tolerance to drought under field conditions. We conducted a field throughfall exclusion experiment to simulate short-term drought (∼67% throug...

Within their natural habitat, plants are subjected to a combination of abiotic conditions that include stresses such as drought and heat. Drought and heat stress have been extensively studied; however, little is known about how their combination impacts plants. The response of Arabidopsis plants to a combination of drought and heat stress was found to be distinct from that of plants subjected t...

Drought has an impact on many aspects of society. To help decision makers reduce the impacts of drought, it is important to improve our understanding of the characteristics and relationships of atmospheric and oceanic parameters that cause drought. In this study, the use of data mining techniques is introduced to find associations between drought and several oceanic and climatic indices that co...

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...

Increasing aridity and drought severity forecast for many land areas could reduce the land carbon (C) sink. However, with limited long-term direct measures, it is difficult to distinguish direct drying effects from counter effects of CO2 enrichment and nitrogen (N) deposition. Here, we document a >50% decline in production of a native C3 grassland over four decades and assign the forcing and ti...