Droughts can be characterized by their severity, frequency and duration, and areal extent. Depth-area-duration analysis, widely used to characterize precipitation extremes, provides a basis for evaluation of drought severity when storm depth is replaced by an appropriate measure of drought severity. We used gridded precipitation and temperature data to force a physically-based macroscale hydrol...

This protocol describes a method by which a large collection of the leafy green vegetable lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) germplasm was screened for likely drought-tolerance traits. Fresh water availability for agricultural use is a growing concern across the United States as well as many regions of the world. Short-term drought events along with regulatory intervention in the regulation of water a...

The aim of this paper is to investigate characteristics of meteorological and agricultural droughts and their trends in Iran, as well as several subregions with different climate conditions from 1980 to 2013. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Soil Moisture Index (SSI) are used as the primary indicators of meteorological and agricultural droughts, respectively. This stu...

Stress is defined as any soil and climatic conditions or combination of both that hinders the full realization of genetic potential of a plant, limiting their growth, development and reproduction. These effects in plants of agricultural interest have a major impact on productivity and quality and thus represent, together with biotic stress, the cause of the gap between yield potential and actua...

— The study examines the consequences of alternative public responses to drought shocks. It does so by drawing on household data from resettlement areas of rural Zimbabwe from 1992–93 to 1995–96 and the estimation of four behavioral relations: the determinants of crop income; the determinants of investment in livestock; the determinants of investment in agricultural capital stock; and the deter...

BACKGROUND The last few decades have recorded a high frequency of the meteorological drought phenomenon. Southern and south-eastern Romania make no exception, with such phenomena often occurring from July to November 2011, which brought about an agrometerological drought that lasted from the third decade of July to early December, with a slight improvement in October. This situation led to a de...

INTRODUCTION Brazil has a large semiarid region, which covers part of 9 states, over 20% of the 5565 municipalities in the country and at 22.5 million persons, 12% of the country's population. This region experiences recurrent and extended droughts and is characterized by low economic development, scarcity of natural resources including water, and difficult agricultural and livestock production...

Agriculture drought occurs when moisture level in soils is insufficient to maintain average crop yields. Initial consequences are in the reduced seasonal output of crops & other related production. An extreme agricultural drought can lead to a famine, which is a prolonged shortage of food in a restricted region causing widespread diseases and deaths from starvation. Agriculture drought is mainl...

The authors present a method for analyzing the economic benefits to the United States resulting from changes in drought frequency and severity due to global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. The method begins by constructing reduced-formmodels of the effect of drought on agriculture and reservoir recreation in the contiguous United States. These relationships are then applied to drought projecti...

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the most important crops in the world. It is the third most important food grain crop in the developing world and is estimated that the demand for maize in developing countries will grow by 50%, from 558 million tons in 1995 to 837 million tons in 2020. Much of this increased demand will be needed by domestic supply for developing countries, which will require inte...