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1. Is a drought a drought in grasslands? Productivity responses to different types of drought

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04793-8  

   Carroll, Charles J.; Slette, Ingrid J.; Griffin-Nolan, Robert J.; Baur, Lauren E.; Hoffman, Ava M.; Denton, Elsie M.; Gray, Jesse E.; Post, Alison K.; Johnston, Melissa K.; Yu, Qiang; et al (January 2021, Oecologia)

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2. Drought Impact on Desert Ecosystems, Drought Network precipitation manipulation experiment in desert grasslands

   https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/5c2eb1c145a3babf399a0587d0189c2e  

   Ohlert, Timothy J; Collins, Scott L (January 2021, Environmental Data Initiative)

   Climate change amplifies the global water cycle, making droughts more frequent and more severe. The hot deserts of the U.S. rely on the stability and frequency of water availability in order to sustain biological communities, making these ecosystems incredibly vulnerable to anticipated alterations in the water cycle. This project seeks to understand which biotic and abiotic variables are principle in determining desert ecosystem sensitivity to drought? To answer these questions, we have installed a drought manipulation that will simulate an extreme drought event by reducing annual precipitation by 66% in seven desert sites. Plant abundance data are collected annually to track changes in the plant community. Data collection began in Spring 2018. Treatments at three Sevilleta sites began in Fall 2018 after data collection in October 2018. Treatments started at four sites in Arizona and California in March and April of 2019 and spring pretreatment data collection. The treatments will last for four years. 

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3. Experimental drought consistently underestimates productivity responses to natural drought in four Central US grasslands

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-025-05746-9  

   Condon, Kathleen V; Carroll, Charles_J W; Griffin‑Nolan, Robert J; Slette, Ingrid J; Wilkins, Kate D; Smith, Melinda D; Knapp, Alan K (July 2025, Oecologia)

   Abstract Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of droughts globally, and grasslands are particularly vulnerable to such hydrological extremes. Drought effects at the ecosystem scale have been assessed both experimentally and through the study of naturally occurring drought, with emerging evidence that the magnitude of drought effects may vary depending on the approach used. We took advantage of a decadal study of four grasslands to directly contrast responses of aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) to simulated vs. natural drought. The grasslands spanned a ~ threefold mean annual precipitation gradient (335–857 mm) and were all subjected to a natural 1-year drought (~ 40% reduction in precipitation from the long-term mean) and a 4 year experimental drought (~ 50% precipitation reduction). We expected that the 4 year drought would reduce ANPP more, and that post-drought recovery would be delayed, compared to the 1-year drought. We found instead that the short-term natural drought reduced ANPP more strongly than the simulated drought in all grasslands (~ 10 to ~ 50%) likely due to the co-occurrence of higher temperatures and vapor pressure deficits with reduced precipitation. Post-drought recovery was site specific and each site differed in their recovery from the natural and experimental droughts. These results align with past analyses that experiments that only manipulate soil moisture likely underestimate the magnitude of natural drought events. However, experiments can provide valuable insight into the relative sensitivity of ecosystems to reduced precipitation and soil moisture, a key aspect of drought. 

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4. Climate Change and Drought: a Perspective on Drought Indices

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-018-0098-x  

   Mukherjee, Sourav; Mishra, Ashok; Trenberth, Kevin E. (October 2018, Current Climate Change Reports)
5. Probabilistic Evaluation of Drought in CMIP6 Simulations

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EF002150  

   Papalexiou, Simon Michael; Rajulapati, Chandra Rupa; Andreadis, Konstantinos M.; Foufoula‐Georgiou, Efi; Clark, Martyn P.; Trenberth, Kevin E. (October 2021, Earth's Future)

   Abstract As droughts have widespread social and ecological impacts, it is critical to develop long‐term adaptation and mitigation strategies to reduce drought vulnerability. Climate models are important in quantifying drought changes. Here, we assess the ability of 285 CMIP6 historical simulations, from 17 models, to reproduce drought duration and severity in three observational data sets using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). We used summary statistics beyond the mean and standard deviation, and devised a novel probabilistic framework, based on the Hellinger distance, to quantify the difference between observed and simulated drought characteristics. Results show that many simulations have less thanerror in reproducing the observed drought summary statistics. The hypothesis that simulations and observations are described by the same distribution cannot be rejected for more thanof the grids based on ourdistance framework. No single model stood out as demonstrating consistently better performance over large regions of the globe. The variance in drought statistics among the simulations is higher in the tropics compared to other latitudinal zones. Though the models capture the characteristics of dry spells well, there is considerable bias in low precipitation values. Good model performance in terms of SPI does not imply good performance in simulating low precipitation. Our study emphasizes the need to probabilistically evaluate climate model simulations in order to both pinpoint model weaknesses and identify a subset of best‐performing models that are useful for impact assessments. 

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