Within their natural habitat, plants are subjected to a combination of abiotic conditions that include stresses such as drought and heat. Drought and heat stress have been extensively studied; however, little is known about how their combination impacts plants. The response of Arabidopsis plants to a combination of drought and heat stress was found to be distinct from that of plants subjected t...

Abstract Recent decades have witnessed growing frequency and severity of catastrophic droughts in many regions the world. Despite lots studies having been dedicated to extreme drought investigation, fundamental question that has long ignored is, What is drought? The answer much more complex than it first appears, because a critical issue study multiscalar nature. To address challenge, this esta...

Drought has an impact on many aspects of society. To help decision makers reduce the impacts of drought, it is important to improve our understanding of the characteristics and relationships of atmospheric and oceanic parameters that cause drought. In this study, the use of data mining techniques is introduced to find associations between drought and several oceanic and climatic indices that co...

Accurate and reliable drought monitoring is essential to drought mitigation efforts and reduction of social vulnerability. A variety of indices, such as the standardized precipitation index (SPI), are used for drought monitoring based on different indicator variables. Because of the complexity of drought phenomena in their causation and impact, droughtmonitoring based on a single variable may b...

Drought stress is a common adverse environmental condition that seriously affects crop productivity worldwide. Due to the complexity of drought as a stress signal, deciphering drought tolerance mechanisms has remained a major challenge to plant biologists. To develop new approaches to study plant drought tolerance, we searched for phenotypes conferred by drought stress and identified the inhibi...

...................................................................... viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1 Background: Economics of Drought Is Underresearched ..................................................................... I Scope an...