The study examined the spatiotemporal distribution of drought in the Maasai rangelands of Kenya. The implications of this distribution, in concert with the documented existing and/or projected social and biophysical factors, on critical rangeland resources in Maasai-pastoralism are discussed using an integrated approach. Participatory interviews with the Maasai, retrieval from archives, and acq...

In this paper, we analyzed the streamflow droughts based on the Percent of Normal Index (PNI) and clustering approaches in the Kurdistan Province, Iran, over the 1981-2010. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test was considered for streamflow time series and the results of K-S test indicated that streamflow time series did follow the normal distribution at the 0.05 significance level. Generally, the ...

Recent drought events in the United States and the magnitude of drought losses indicate the continuing vulnerability of the country to drought. Until recently, drought management in many states, including Nebraska, has been largely response oriented with little or no attention to mitigation and preparedness. In 1998, Nebraska began to revise its drought plan in order to place more emphasis on m...

1. The effect of extreme climate events on ecosystems is an important driver of the bioticresponse to climate change. For forests, extreme drought has been linked to negativeeffects such as large scale mortality and reduced primary production. However, theresponse of plant communities to extreme drought events remains poorly understood. 2. We used mortality data from a long term mon...

The severity of recent droughts in semiarid regions is increasingly attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but it is unclear whether these moisture anomalies exceed those of the past and how past variability compares to future projections. On the Mongolian Plateau, a recent decade-long drought that exceeded the variability in the instrumental record was associated with economic, social, an...

Existing drought indices have been widely used to monitor meteorological drought and agricultural drought; however, few of them are focus on drought monitoring for grassland regions. This study presented a new drought index, the Grassland Drought Index (GDI), for monitoring drought conditions in global grassland regions. These regions are vital for the environment and human society but suscepti...

Climate change is progressively increasing severe drought events in the Northern Hemisphere, causing regional tree die-off events and contributing to the global reduction of the carbon sink efficiency of forests. There is a critical lack of integrated community-wide assessments of drought-induced responses in forests at the macroecological scale, including defoliation, mortality, and food web r...

Climate model simulations run as part of the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Drought Working Group initiative were analyzed to determine the impact of three patterns of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies on drought and pluvial frequency and intensity around the world. The three SST forcing patterns include a global pattern similar to the background warming trend, a pattern ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Extreme climatic events such as severe droughts are expected to increase with climate change and to limit grassland perennity. The present study aimed to characterize the adaptive responses by which temperate herbaceous grassland species resist, survive and recover from a severe drought and to explore the relationships between plant resource use and drought resistance strate...

Extreme climate events are being recognized as important factors in the effects on crop growth and yield. Increased climatic variability leads to more frequent extreme conditions which may result in crops being exposed to more than one extreme event within a growing season. The aim of this study was to examine the implications of different drought treatments on the protein fractions in grains o...