Somalia faces ‘four horsemen of the food emergency apocalypse’
Cornell University
By bridging experiments in the lab and field, Danforth Center scientists and their collaborators identified microbes that influence sorghum development during drought.
Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study that was published with the help of a University at Albany archeologist.
Simultaneous extreme heat and drought events have consequences in a variety of areas – for example the economy, health and food production.
In heatwaves where heat and drought combine, effects can destabilize interlinked sectors, including health, energy and food production systems.
Dust from all over the world is landing in the Sierra Nevada mountains carrying microbes that are toxic to both plants and humans.
California’s McKinney Fire grew to become the state’s largest fire so far this year. The risk of wildfire is rising globally due to climate change. Below are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Wildfires channel on Newswise.
Story tips: Drought-resistant crops, hydropower, AI for atomic measurement, controlling refrigerants and recycling e-waste
KINGSTON, R.I. – August 1, 2022 – For backyard gardeners, mild droughts and water ban restrictions common during the summer months can be a cause for concern. Kate Venturini Hardesty, a program administrator and educator with the University of Rhode Island’s Cooperative Extension, offers some tips for backyard gardeners who are feeling the heat.
Soil-borne pathogens are resilient to stressful conditions, and may be more likely than non-pathogenic microbes to survive the prolonged dry spells that are projected to persist regionally across many parts of the globe.
Researchers have discovered a new gene in barley and wheat that controls the angle of root growth in soil, opening the door to new cereal varieties with deeper roots that are less susceptible to drought and nutrient stress, thus mitigating the effects of climate change.
A team of NAU scientists, led by SICCS professor Kiona Ogle, won a $3.6 million grant from the NSF to study the legacy of extreme climate events on ecosystems in the American West; they hope to not only know how long an extreme event influences ecosystems but also figure out how to better forecast such effects.
The latest research news in Climate Science on Newswise.
Drought can cause issues for grain crops and three Clemson University scientists are working on getting to the root of the problem. The scientists believe crops have a lesson to learn from their weedy relatives when it comes to growing in drier soils.
A team of researchers has discovered human activity is the cause for drying out the climate in southwestern Europe.
Physicist Céline Bonfils studies the multiple influences affecting climate change. Her team identified these “fingerprints” in historical climate simulations to help separate the signals from the noise in observations.
A white mineral ring as tall as the Statue of Liberty creeps up the steep shoreline of Lake Mead, a Colorado River reservoir just east of Las Vegas on the Nevada-Arizona border. It is the country’s largest reservoir, and it’s draining rapidly.
For a successful climate change strategy, it is crucial to understand how the impacts of global warming may evolve over time.
Attribution science has led to major advances in linking the impacts of extreme weather and human-induced climate change, but large gaps in the published research still conceal the full extent of climate change damage, warns a new study released today in the first issue of Environmental Research: Climate, a new academic journal published by IOP Publishing.
Extreme dry conditions contributed to the decline of the ancient South Arabian kingdom of Himyar.
Climate change gives rise to more unstable weather, local droughts and extreme temperature records, but a coherent theory relating local and global climate is still under active development.
Certain rootstocks may improve plant performance by enhancing the amount of root biomass used to support shoot function
Plants — they’re just like us, with unique techniques for handling stress.
Humanity is “at a crossroads” when it comes to managing drought and accelerating mitigation must be done “urgently, using every tool we can,” says a new report from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
The lake level of the Dead Sea is currently dropping by more than one metre every year - mainly because of the heavy water consumption in the catchment area.
Drought and the potential increase in the number of droughts worldwide due to climate change remains a concern for scientists. A recent study led by Stony Brook University researchers suggests that human migration due to droughts will increase by at least 200 percent as we move through the 21st Century.
A new UC Riverside study shows it’s not how much extra water you give your plants, but when you give it that counts.
Spatially isolated “hot spots” and brief “hot moments” shape methane emissions from tropical forest soils. In this research, scientists used model simulation to understand how microbes and soil variables contribute to the soil’s methane production and consumption. The models indicate that drought alters the diffusion of oxygen and microbes into and out of soil, leading to increased methane release from the entire hillslope during drought recovery. This finding is important for understanding sources of methane, an important greenhouse gas.
Partnerships between water utilities, irrigation districts and other stakeholders in California will play a critical role in funding new infrastructure under the Water Resilience Portfolio Initiative announced in 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but a new study warns that benefits might not be evenly distributed without proper structure to the agreements.
A new study, “Global field observations of tree die-off reveal hotter-drought fingerprint for Earth’s forests,” compiled a global database of the published locations of climate-induced forest die-off events, from 1970-2018, across 675 locations. After analyzing the climate conditions at each location during each event, researchers found a common ‘hotter-drought fingerprint’ for Earth’s forests, a term that describes the combination of higher temperatures and more frequent droughts for a lethal set of climate conditions.
Record-breaking Victorian weather has been revealed after millions of archived rainfall records dating back nearly 200 years were rescued by thousands of volunteers during the first Covid-19 lockdown.
New research, led by Dr Petra Holden from the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), has shown how catchment restoration – through the management of alien tree infestation in the mountains of the southwestern Cape – could have lessened the impact of climate change on low river flows during the Cape Town “Day Zero” drought.
Droughts occurring at the same time across different regions of the planet could place an unprecedented strain on the global agricultural system and threaten the water security of millions of people, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change.
Scientists have long hypothesized that climate change, by intensifying stressors like drought or wildfires, would make an ecosystem more vulnerable to invasive plants. Those invasive plants may in turn alter the environment in ways that amplify the impacts of climate change, explained Luke Flory, a professor of ecology in the UF/IFAS agronomy department. A new long-term field study conducted by Flory’s lab offers the first experimental evidence to support this hypothesis.
Two Clemson University civil engineers said their newly published research is the most comprehensive analysis so far of what causes flash drought, a weather phenomenon that has been blamed for billions of dollars in crop damage and increased wildfire risk.
Shrubs in the desert Southwest have increased their water use efficiency at some of the highest rates ever observed to cope with a decades-long megadrought. That’s the finding of a new study from University of Utah researchers, who found that although the shrubs’ efficiency increases are unprecedented and heroic, they may not be enough to adapt to the long-term drying trend in the West.
ASU News enlisted the state’s climatologist and a tourism expert to discuss this year’s cause and effects of snow, or lack thereof, and the impacts to our water supply and economy.
Climate change is fueling more floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme storms across the United States. As a result, aging power grids are being pushed beyond their limits, sometimes with deadly impacts. (In 2020, a series of unusual winter storms knocked the power out in Texas for days -- leading to shortages of water and heat and more than 100 deaths.)
In California’s Sierra Nevada, western pine beetle infestations amped up by global warming were found to kill 30% more ponderosa pine trees than the beetles do under drought alone.
Pecans for holiday pies and treats grown mostly in drought-ridden south
Naturalist John Muir called the Sierra Nevada “the Range of Light.” But a more ominous nickname, “the Range of Fire,” may lie ahead, according to new research from the University of California, Irvine. By 2040, as humans continue to change the climate, fire-conducive heat waves will become so common that the number of blazes throughout the Sierra stands to increase about 50 percent, researchers found.
Increased temperatures during an historic drought in California contributed to the death of large numbers of giant pine trees speeding up the life cycle of a tree-killing beetle.
Flash droughts are described as rapidly developing, unexpected periods of drought. These flash droughts can cause severe impacts to agricultural and ecological systems and cause ripple effects that extend even further.
Children are to face disproportionate increases in lifetime extreme event exposure – especially in low-income countries, according to new research by an international group of scientists.