One of the challenges facing beef producers across Australia is the ever increasing occurrence of drought. Drought presents many obstacles to the management of a beef enterprise with countless operational, financial and emotional hurdles testing the resolve of beef producers. While often not on the top of the priority list, one of the considerations that managers of a stud cattle operation need...

Drought is an increasingly common phenomenon in drylands as a consequence of climate change. We used 311 sites across a broad range of environmental conditions in Patagonian rangelands to evaluate how drought severity and temperature (abiotic factors) and vegetation structure (biotic factors) modulate the impact of a drought event on the annual integral of normalized difference vegetation index...

Drought is the most critical environmental factor limiting the productivity of agricultural crops worldwide. Increased frequency and severity of drought are expected to accompany climate change and will negatively impact global food security. Wide yield variability from field to field, and consequently reduced average yield on a regional scale often occur under drought conditions. The reasons f...

Common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) originated in the New World and are the grain legume of greatest production for direct human consumption. Common bean production is subject to frequent droughts in highland Mexico, in the Pacific coast of Central America, in northeast Brazil, and in eastern and southern Africa from Ethiopia to South Africa. This article reviews efforts to improve common bean...

Each year, droughts cause significant economic and agricultural losses across the world. The early warning and onset detection of drought is of particular importance for effective agriculture and water resource management. Previous studies show that the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), a measure of precipitation deficit, detects drought onset earlier than other indicators. Here we show that ...

This paper describes the evolution of drought-related public policies in Northeast Brazil (NEB). Using a historical approach, we show that the evolution of public policy has not been characterized by abrupt shifts, but has instead been shaped through debates between renowned intellectuals. The resulting public policies formed a hydrological infrastructure that delivers clean water needed for ro...

Donald A. Wilhite and Kenneth G. Hubbard Center for Agricultural Meteorology and Climatology University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska The ability to collect weather data in near-real time has improved because of technological advances, enabling weather data users to obtain more weather data over wider areas, and in a more timely fashion. The number of near-real time climate networks is increasi...