Breaking News: Drought

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Study investigates effects of irrigation management on yield and profit

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Extreme drought’s impact on plants will become more dominant under future climate change, as noted in a paper out today in the journal Nature Climate Change. Analysis shows that not only will droughts become more frequent under future climates, but more of those events will be extreme, adding to the reduction of plant production essential to human and animal populations.

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Enough physical evidence spanning millennia has now come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

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Scientists identify more efficient methods for evaluating heat tolerance

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Wheat is the world’s largest rain-fed crop in terms of harvested area and supplies about 20% of all calories consumed by humans. A new study has found that unless steps are taken to mitigate climate change, up to 60% of current wheat-growing areas worldwide could see simultaneous, severe and prolonged droughts by the end of the century.

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Research shows adding sesame to cotton-sorghum crop rotations is possible in west Texas

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A new Columbia Engineering study indicates that the world will experience more frequent and more extreme drought and aridity than currently experienced in the coming century, exacerbated by both climate change and land-atmosphere processes.

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With numerous fires raging in ecologically priceless Amazon rainforests, Rutgers University–New Brunswick Professor Laura C. Schneider can comment on current fire patterns (the number of fires and their location), linkages to tropical rain forest ecology and changes in Brazilian land use policies around deforestation.

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Analyzing the full life cycle of long-term droughts and how they relate to El Niño and La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean could eventually lead to better prediction of damaging, multiyear droughts in the Southwestern U.S.

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Wine researchers at the University of Adelaide are investigating drought-tolerant grape varieties from Cyprus for their suitability for Australian conditions.

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Irvine, Calif., July 1, 2019 – A catastrophic forest die-off in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range in 2015-2016 was caused by the inability of trees to reach diminishing supplies of subsurface water following years of severe drought and abnormally warm temperatures. That’s the conclusion by researchers from the University of California, Irvine and UC Merced outlined in a study published today in Nature Geoscience.

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New research led by University of Utah biologists William Anderegg, Anna Trugman and David Bowling find that some plants and trees are prolific spendthrifts in drought conditions—“spending” precious soil water to cool themselves and, in the process, making droughts more intense. The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Wheat plants engineered to have fewer microscopic pores – called stomata – on their leaves are better able to survive drought conditions associated with climate breakdown, according to a new study.

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Droughts, floods, natural disasters and other climatic shifts influenced between 3% and 20% of armed conflicts over the last century. By century’s end, one in four armed conflicts, including civil wars, will be a result of a changing climate.

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Groundbreaking tools and techniques can develop climate resilient wheat

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Although pollen has covered cars for weeks and allergy sufferers have been sneezing, we think of sex as being the realm of animals. But plant sex can be quite interesting, especially in species that can have male or female flowers. In a study in the journal Annals of Botany, Rutgers University–New Brunswick researchers found that striped maple trees can change sex from year to year. A tree may be male one year and female the next, and while male trees grow more, female trees are more likely to die.

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Observations and climate reconstructions using data from tree rings confirm that human activity was affecting the worldwide drought risk as far back as the early 20th century.

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Northern Arizona University researchers used climate records dating back thousands of years to demonstrate that warming in the Arctic is associated with fewer storms and increased aridity in a huge swath of the Northern Hemisphere, which could lead to dramatic effects on agriculture and population centers throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.

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UC San Diego Distinguished Professor Julian Schroeder has been awarded the Khalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation.

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International Space Station’s ECOSTRESS gathers plant data

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More than 2 billion people worldwide are affected by water shortages, wildfires, crop losses, forest diebacks or other environmental or economic woes brought on by drought.

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Researchers link root water uptake to root traits and assess (poor) performance of common models.

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Researchers find gusty winds increase surface evaporation that drives summer rainstorms in the Tropical West Pacific.

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A study using preserved paper-bark tea tree leaves has revealed what rainfall was like over 7000 years, including several severe droughts worse and longer lasting than the 12-year Millennium Drought.

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Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) have used new space technology to predict droughts and increased bushfire risk up to five months in advance.

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Northern Arizona University researchers Julie Mueller, Adrienne Soder and Abe Springer found residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area are willing to pay to protect critical habitats, access to recreation, surface and groundwater and culturally significant areas around the Salt and Verde River watershed.

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In places where water is scarce—the world’s deserts, for example—getting water to people requires feats of engineering and irrigation that can be cumbersome and expensive. A pair of new studies from researchers at The Ohio State University offers a possible solution, inspired by nature.

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Researchers are studying peanut varieties to find a ‘water conservation’ trait. It would help the plant maintain a high yield during a drought.

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Scientists explore how drought-tolerant plants communicate to nearby microorganisms, suggesting ways to engineer more resilient bioenergy crops.

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A new modeling framework helps understand the consequences of future sea-ice loss in the Arctic.

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Researchers discover how certain bacteria may safeguard plant growth during a drought, making way for strategies to improve crop productivity.

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Researchers at the University of Adelaide have found evidence of climate change that coincided with the first wave of European settlement of Australia, which effectively delivered a double-punch of drying and land clearance to the country. The research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, suggests that eastern Australia, including Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, was much drier after 1890 than the Little Ice Age period that preceded it.

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Climate change is impacting the Caribbean, with millions facing increasing food insecurity and decreasing freshwater availability as droughts become more likely across the region, according to new Cornell University research in Geophysical Research Letters.

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The trick to boosting crops in drought-prone, food-insecure areas of West Africa could be a ubiquitous native shrub that persists in the toughest of growing conditions. Growing these shrubs side-by-side with the food crop millet increased millet production by more than 900 percent.

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Researchers have found a natural way to help plants retain water, using a strain of beneficial bacteria living right in the soil around the plant roots. The goal is to use this microbe on a larger scale to combat droughts and increase crop yields.

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On top of rising sea levels, stronger hurricanes and worsening wildfires, scientists project that human-caused climate change will result in one of the most dire consequences imaginable: a disruption in the global beer supply.

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One in 10 Americans depends on the Colorado River for bathing and drinking. Last fall’s record-high temperatures reduced Colorado snowpack in winter 2018 to 66 percent of normal, sparking concern over water shortages downstream and leaving water managers fearful of a repeat. Berkeley Lab hydrological science expert Bhavna Arora explains how unseasonably warm weather and drought can affect water quality.

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Global warming is projected to spawn more extreme wet and dry weather around the world, according to a Rutgers-led study. Those extremes include more frequent dry spells in the northwestern, central and southern United States and in Mexico, and more frequent heavy rainfall events in south Asia, the Indochinese Peninsula and southern China.

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In a paper published in Nature, researchers led by University of Utah biologist William Anderegg report that forests with trees that employ a high diversity of traits related to water use suffer less of an impact from drought. The results, which expand on previous work that looked at individual tree species’ resilience based on hydraulic traits, lead to new research directions on forest resilience and inform forest managers working to rebuild forests after logging or wildfire.

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Informatics professor Ben Ruddell will leverage the datasets and methods they produced for FEWSION to map the water footprint of western agriculture and demonstrate the indirect effects caused by changes in snowmelt.

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The study is the first to use a nationwide survey representing an entire country in sub-Saharan Africa to find connections between droughts, migration and violence. The survey asked if respondents had to move because of drought, were victims of violence, and, using an indirect questioning method, whether they have latent support violence.

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Rattlesnakes and other venomous reptiles may bite more people during rainy years than in seasons wracked by drought, a new study shows.

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The San Joaquin Valley in central California, like many other regions in the western United States, faces drought and ongoing groundwater extraction, happening faster than it can be replenished. And the land is sinking as a result — by up to a half-meter annually according to a new Cornell University study in Science Advances.

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A long-term study led by the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley tracked how hundreds of species in the Carrizo Plain National Monument fared during the historic drought that struck California from 2012 to 2015. It shows surprising winners and losers, uncovering patterns that may be relevant for climate change.

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Dry months are getting hotter in large parts of the United States, another sign that human-caused climate change is forcing people to encounter new extremes.

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With the new variety, growers would be able to produce more market-ready peanuts, and consumers can get more of the protein-filled legume.

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A collaboration between professors from The University of Texas at El Paso and the University of North Texas is leading to a better understanding of the composition of dust carried by rain across the state, and how that dust can affect the places where it ends up.