Paper: ‘Defining Ecological Drought for the 21st Century’.
Crausbay, S., A. Ramirez, S. Carter, M. Cross, K. Hall, D. Bathke, J. Betancourt, S. Colt, A. Cravens, M. Dalton, J. Dunham, L. Hay, M. Hayes, J. McEvoy, C. McNutt, M. Moritz, K. Nislow, N. Raheem, and T. Sanford, 2017: Defining ecological drought for the 21st century.
Bull.
Amer.
Meteor.
Soc.
doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0292.1 From lines 64 – 72: To prepare us for the rising risk of drought in the 21st century, we need to reframe the drought conversation by underscoring the value to human communities in sustaining ecosystems and the critical services they provide when water availability dips below critical thresholds.
In particular, we need to define a new type of drought—ecological drought—that integrates the ecological, climatic, hydrological socioeconomic, and cultural dimensions of drought.
To this end, we define the term ecological drought as an episodic deficit in water availability that drives ecosystems beyond thresholds of vulnerability, impacts ecosystem services, and triggers feedbacks in natural and/or human systems.
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