Periodic vegetation patterns (PVPs) are striking features of many global drylands. Although they have attracted wide research study, resulting in many hypotheses, their origin and controlling factors remain unresolved. Theoretical works dominate a large literature seeking to account for the occurrence and properties of PVPs, especially banded vegetation patterns (‘tiger bush’). In light of...

Crater degradation on Mars is a key to understand erosion through time. Strongly eroded craters in the highlands are interpreted to be the result of enhanced erosion rate during the Noachian epoch [1]. While fluvial valleys climatic meaning and duration are still difficult to define (strongly warmer climate or episodic activity under slightly warmer climate), the enhanced Noachian craters degra...

Paleorecords of the middle Holocene (MH) from the North American mid-continent can offer insights into ecological responses to pervasive drought that may accompany future climatic warming. We analyzed MH sediments from West Olaf Lake (WOL) and Steel Lake (SL) in Minnesota to examine the effects of warm/dry climatic conditions on prairie-woodland ecosystems. Mineral composition and carbonate del...

A multivariate, principal-component based index has been developed to quantify the severity of droughts. Named the Aggregate Drought Index (ADI), it describes the meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural aspects of drought on a climate-divisional basis, using fluctuations in the values of five variables associated with the hydrologic cycle and available water: precipitation, evaporation, ...

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...

Climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and survival via weather extremes and climatic impacts on food yields, fresh water, infectious diseases, conflict, and displacement. Paradoxically, these risks to health are neither widely nor fully recognized. Historical experiences of diverse societies experiencing climatic changes, spanning multicentury to single-year duration, provide in...

Mycorrhiza is a symbiotic association between a group of soil fungi called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and plants. The successful association between plants and AMF constitutes a strategy to improve the nutritional status of both associates, which reduces the use of fertilizers specially phosphorus nutrition (Almagrabi and Abdelmoneim, 2012). The AMF take carbohydrates compounds from their pla...

Climate change in the UK is predicted to cause an increase in summer drought events. Elatobium abietinum is an important pest of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), causing defoliation of trees, and is predicted to become more abundant in response to climatic change, reducing spruce productivity. Populations are also moderated by invertebrate predators, though the extent to which this might be mod...

Food legume crops play important roles in conservation farming systems and contribute to food security in the developing world. However, in many regions of the world, their production has been adversely affected by drought. Although water scarcity is a severe abiotic constraint of legume crops productivity, it remains unclear how the effects of drought co-vary with legume species, soil texture,...