In order to have effective agricultural production the impacts of drought must be mitigated. An important aspect of mitigating the impacts of drought is an effective method of forecasting future drought events. In this study, three methods of forecasting short-term drought for short lead times are explored in the Awash River Basin of Ethiopia. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was the ...

Drought has been a major cause of agricultural disaster, yet how it affects the vulnerability of maize and wheat production in combination with several co-varying factors (i.e., phenological phases, agro-climatic regions, soil texture) remains unclear. Using a data synthesis approach, this study aims to better characterize the effects of those co-varying factors with drought and to provide crit...

Drought is a major threat to agricultural production and drought tolerance is a prime target for molecular approaches to crop improvement. To achieve meaningful results, these approaches must be linked with suitable phenotyping protocols at all stages, such as the screening of germplasm collections, mutant libraries, mapping populations, transgenic lines and breeding materials and the design of...

One of the major problems in the real time decision of agricultural intelligence expert system is how to be obtained the real time information of crops growth and its close relation environment data. As result the extraction of crops planting areas and their spatial distribution and their growth variety, especially when the natural disaster arises, such as drought, its spatial distribution and ...

This paper discusses the diverse climate forcings that impact agricultural systems, and contrasts the current paradigm of using global models downscaled to agricultural areas (a top-down approach) with a new paradigm that first assesses the vulnerability of agricultural activities to the spectrum of environmental risk including climate (a bottom-up approach). To illustrate the wide spectrum of ...

Egerton University with a mandate to undertake empirical research and analysis on contemporary economic and agricultural policy issues in Kenya. The institute is widely recognized as a centre of excellence in policy analysis on topical agricultural and food security issues of the day, and in its wide dissemination of findings to government and other key stakeholders with a view to influencing p...

Over the past 40 years, drought has affected more people in world than any other natural hazard, affecting large segments of population and destroying resource base, livestock livelihoods. Recent projections show that events are expected to increase frequency intensity due climate change. According studies conducted by Food Agriculture Organization United Nations (FAO), 83% all damages losses c...

Crops are often cultivated in regions where they will face environmental adversities; resulting in substantial yield loss which can ultimately lead to food and societal problems. Thus, significant efforts have been made to breed stress tolerant cultivars in an attempt to minimize these problems and to produce more stability with respect to crop yields across broad geographies. Since stress tole...

Plant growth and yields are decreased by salinity, drought and other environmental stress conditions. Soil salinization is one of man’s oldest environmental disasters. The historic records show that many human civilizations declined because of the destruction of crop production by salinization of arable lands. Recent estimates suggest that about 20-25% of the world’s irrigated land is destroyed...