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Semi-High Throughput Screening for Potential Drought-tolerance in Lettuce Lactuca sativa Germplasm Collections
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How ecologists define drought, and why we should do better.

Ingrid J Slette1,2, Alison K Post1,2, Mai Awad2,3

  • 1Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA.

Global Change Biology
|July 6, 2019
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Ecologists often fail to define drought, hindering ecological research. Future studies should clearly define drought conditions for better synthesis and understanding of its ecosystem impacts.

Keywords:
SPEIclimatedroughtliterature reviewprecipitation

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Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Environmental Science

Background:

  • Drought is a major driver of ecosystem dynamics, predicted to intensify globally.
  • Ecologists need clear definitions of drought to study its impacts effectively.
  • Current definitions and characterizations of drought in ecological studies are inconsistent.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To review and assess how ecological drought studies define and characterize drought conditions.
  • To identify inconsistencies in drought definitions within the ecological literature.

Main Methods:

  • Conducted a literature review of 564 ecological drought studies.
  • Analyzed how drought was described and defined in the selected publications.
  • Calculated Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for a subset of studies.

Main Results:

  • Only 32% of studies explicitly defined drought conditions.
  • Approximately 30% of studies equated "dry conditions" with "drought" without clear characterization.
  • About 50% of studies occurred within normal climatic variability, despite being labeled as drought.

Conclusions:

  • The lack of explicit drought definitions and characterization in ecological research impedes synthesis and broad ecological inferences.
  • Future studies must provide clear definitions or quantitative metrics for drought conditions.
  • Standardized drought quantification will improve the rigor of ecological drought research and understanding of its impacts.