Climate change projections anticipate increased frequency and intensity of drought stress, but grassland responses to severe droughts and their potential to recover are poorly understood. In many grasslands, high land-use intensity has enhanced productivity and promoted resource-acquisitive species at the expense of resource-conservative ones. Such changes in plant functional composition could ...

Bioclimatic models aimed assessing a species’ sensitivity to climate change incorporate mean shifts in climate variables; however the more acute threat to the persistence of species may result from increased frequency of extreme climatic events, including increased duration and severity of droughts. Here we assess climate-change sensitivity using niche modeling that unlike bioclimatic modeling ...

Predicted increases in the frequency and duration of drought are expected to negatively affect tree vitality, but we know little about how water shortage will influence needle anatomy and thereby the trees' photosynthetic and hydraulic capacity. In this study, we evaluated anatomical changes in sun and shade needles of 20-year-old Norway spruce trees exposed to artificial drought stress. Canopy...

A key feature of anticipated 21st century droughts in Southwest North America is the concurrence of elevated temperatures and increased aridity. Instrumental records and paleoclimatic evidence for past prolonged drought in the Southwest that coincide with elevated temperatures can be assessed to provide insights on temperature-drought relations and to develop worst-case scenarios for the future...

Two potato clones (Solanum tuberosum L.) of the Andean cultivar group, called Sullu and SS2613, with different drought-tolerance phenotypes were exposed to a continuously increasing drought stress in a field trial. At the physiological level, while relative leaf water contents were similar in both clones, osmotic potential was lower in Sullu and declined more strongly during drought compared wi...

Droughts are a recurrent and natural part of the Australian hydroclimate, with evidence of drought dating back thousands of years. However, our ability to monitor, attribute, forecast and manage drought is exposed as insufficient whenever a drought occurs. This paper summarises what is known about drought hazard, as opposed to the impacts of drought, in Australia and finds that, unlike other hy...

Drought-induced, regional-scale dieback of forests has emerged as a global concern that is expected to escalate under model projections of climate change. Since 2000, drought of unusual severity, extent, and duration has affected large areas of western North America, leading to regional-scale dieback of forests in the southwestern US. We report on drought impacts on forests in a region farther ...

IPCC Assessment Report 4 model projections suggest that the subtropical dry zones of the world will both dry and expand poleward in the future due to greenhouse warming. The US Southwest is particularly vulnerable in this regard and model projections indicate a progressive drying there out to the end of the 21st century. At the same time, the USA has been in a state of drought over much of the ...

In this study, the temporal and spatial variations of groundwater drought using a Standardized Groundwater Level Index (SGI) were analyzed based on 40 monthly groundwater level observation wells from 1989 to 2012 in Jiangsu Province, China. Meteorological drought, calculated by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), was also included to reveal its propagation and impact on the groundwater ...