California is suffering from a serious drought and the future of turfgrass and other landscape plants has never been more uncertain. Use of drought tolerant plant species should be at the forefront of water conservation management plans for golf courses and other landscapes. Warm-season or C4 grasses are better adapted to warmer, drier climates and use at least 20% less water compared to cool-s...

A general prediction of ecological theory is that climate change will favor invasive nonindigenous plant species (NIPS) over native species. However, the relative fitness advantage enjoyed by NIPS is often affected by resource limitation and potentially by extreme climatic events such as drought. Genetic constraints may also limit the ability of NIPS to adapt to changing climatic conditions. In...

In the reforestation program now being carried on by various state and federal agencies, many millions of tree seedlings are planted each year. An extremely large number of these planted seedlings are killed within the first year or two after planting. One of the major causes of the fatalities is the inability of seedlings to resist drought. If the properties involved in drought resistance of s...

to evaluate morphological markers linked with drought stress resistance for screening almond genotypes in the breeding programs the effect of drought stress was studied on six nominated almond genotypes seedlings. the six pre-selected water stress mimposed almond genotypes included: homozygote sweet (butte from university of california), heterozygote sweet (shahrood12, shahrood18, shahrood21 an...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Despite general agreement regarding the adaptive importance of plasticity, evidence for the role of environmental resource availability in plants is scarce. In arid and semi-arid environments, the persistence and dominance of perennial species depends on their capacity to tolerate drought: tolerance could be given on one extreme by fixed traits and, on the other, by plastic ...

Perennial grasses are promising feedstocks for bioenergy production in the Midwestern USA. Few experiments have addressed how drought influences their carbon fluxes and storage. This study provides a direct comparison of ecosystem-scale measurements of carbon fluxes associated with miscanthus (Miscanthus × giganteus), switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), restored native prairie and maize (Zea mays)/...

Mycotoxin-producing Fusarium graminearum and related species cause Fusarium head blight on cultivated grasses, such as wheat and barley. However, these Fusarium species may have had a longer evolutionary history with North American grasses than with cultivated crops and may interact with the ancestral hosts in ways which are biochemically distinct. We assayed 25 species of asymptomatic native g...