Drought and Land-Cover Conditions in the Great Plains

Abstract

Land–atmosphere interactions play a critical role in the Earth system, and a better understanding of these interactions could improve weather and climate models. The interaction among drought, vegetation productivity, and land cover is of particular significance. In a semiarid environment, such as the U.S. Great Plains, droughts can have a large influence on the productivity of agriculture and grasslands, with serious environmental and economic impacts. Here, we used the vegetation drought response index (VegDRI) drought indicator to investigate the response of vegetation to weather and climate for land-cover types in the Great Plains in the United States from 1989 to 2012. We found that analysis that focused on land-cover types within ecoregion divisions provided substantially more and land-cover-based detail on the timing and intensity of drought than did summarizing across the entire Great Plains region. In the northern Great Plains, VegDRI measured more frequent drought impacts on vegetation in the western ecoregions than in the eastern ecoregions. Across the ecoregions of the Great Plains, drought impacts on vegetation were more commonly found in grassland than in cropland. For example, in the “Northwestern Great Plains” ecoregion (which encompasses areas of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska), grassland and nonirrigated cropland were observed in VegDRI to have historical fractional drought coverages in the growing season of 17% and 11%, respectively.

Bacterial but Not Fungal Rhizosphere Community Composition Differ among Perennial Grass Ecotypes under Abiotic Environmental Stress

“…The plant microbiome and its derived functions can substantially extend the plant hosts’ adaptive capacity and resilience to a variety of environmental stressors ( 82 ). In the Great Plains, droughts are common ( 83 ) and productivity is limited ( 84 ), especially in tallgrass prairies. This study provides novel insights into the understanding of the impact of the rhizobiome on the enhancement of drought tolerance of A. gerardii , and its implications in grassland restoration efforts and management.…”

An assessment of remote sensing-based drought index over different land cover types in southern Africa

“…The simultaneous analysis of meteorological drought impact on multiple land cover types at regional scale is crucial for quantifying the environmental impacts of droughts especially in the context of climate change (Vicente-Serrano 2007). This is more critical because drought impacts on vegetation can influence regional land cover type stability and transformation of the vegetation landscape (Tollerud et al 2018).…”

“…A number of studies have reported drought impact on single land cover types mostly focusing on crop, e.g. (Tollerud et al 2018;Kuri et al 2019;Gidey et al 2018;Kogan 1995). There are very few studies that have focused on the analysis of drought impacts on land cover types which are dominated by rural communities ('social pixels' or 'village pixels').…”

Phosphorus forms by depth in sediments from the Qu’Appelle lakes, Saskatchewan, Canada

“…However, there have been no P-NMR studies of lake sediments in the Northern Great Plains to date. The Northern Great Plains region in the United States and Canadian Prairie Ecozone has relatively flat grasslands with a large agricultural land base, important for global food security (Tollerud et al, 2018;Baulch et al, 2019). In the Canadian Prairies, lakes are alkaline (Hammer, 1986), and several lakes show historical evidence of eutrophication through nutrient loading (Barica, 1993;Quinlan, 2000;Patoine and Leavitt, 2006).…”