NORTH ANDOVER — With much of the state locked in a severe drought, Governor Charlie Baker urged the public on Thursday to restrict water use as officials extended support to farmers whose crops have been damaged by the withering conditions. Massachusetts is facing its worst drought in more than a decade, and areas of “extreme drought” have extended across the northeast part of the state, according to the US Drought Monitor’s latest report, released Thursday. Before last week, officials had not declared an extreme drought in Massachusetts since the Drought Monitor began its surveys in 1999. The extreme conditions have damaged the state’s agriculture and overall economy and require a broad, collective response, Baker said. “This is a really big issue and this is a really big deal,” said Baker, standing in front of a strawberry field that has been stunted by the lack of rainfall. “Minimize your water usage both inside and outside your home. You can eliminate or limit watering your lawns, you can eliminate or limit washing your car.” With the drought showing little sign of relenting, state officials are working to develop an emergency loan program to help affected farms and small businesses. “All of us know the importance of farming in Massachusetts in terms of our food supply,” said Jay Ash,…

California Overcame 1/100 Odds to Beat Its Epic Drought.
Never tell California the odds.
Not only has the state recovered from its record-breaking drought, it did so in record time.
According to a new NOAA study looking at 445 years of climate data, California had a 1 percent chance of breaking the drought in just two years.
“What we see in the historic record is an increase in the likelihood of warm and dry periods, punctuated by wet conditions,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, climate scientist at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
“What we used are existing climate reconstructions based on tree ring data, which show river and stream flows,” says Eugene Wahl, the study’s lead author and a paleoclimatologist for NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.
To make sure their correlation was sound, Wahl and his co-authors calibrated tree rings to stream flow for over 60 years of data—from 1916 to 1977.
All this legwork was really so Wahl and his team really could figure out the rate at which California recovered from its most recent drought relative to those in the past.
The following year, the bucket gets a little more water.
A little more the following year.

California’s almond boom has ramped up water use, consumed wetlands and stressed pollinators.
A new study using aerial imagery across the state of California has found that converting land to grow almonds between 2007 and 2014 has led to a 27% annual increase in irrigation demands — despite the state’s historic drought.
The conversion of lands to almond orchards was sparked by a rapid growth in demand and rising almond prices.
Consumption of almonds has jumped 200% since 2005 and almond prices rose from about a dollar per pound in 2000 to a peak of around $5 per pound in 2014 according to the study’s author.
Almonds are entirely dependent on domestic honeybees for pollination, and each almond tree has tens of thousands of flowers, she explained.
But instead of it all being former cotton or tomato fields, a lot of the new almond orchards were formerly natural landscapes, including wetlands.
"More than 16,000 acres were converted from land classified as wetlands to almonds."
The work is being presented on Wednesday at a poster session at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver and the research submitted to Nature Publishing’s open access journal, Scientific Reports.
"The next thing we want to tackle is what the increase in almonds will mean for the demand on pollinators," says Watson.
That means a lot of bees from different locations coming to one location and mixing — increasing the chances of diseases spreading.

Overlooked plants defy drought.
A feature thought to make plants sensitive to drought could actually hold the key to them coping with it better, according to new findings published in eLife.
The new research suggests breeders should explore them for "stay green" traits.
"When breeders are looking for plants able to withstand drought, they discount those resistant to ABA, but our findings show that a subset of ABA-resistant plants may be a great source of drought-tolerant germplasm," says Professor Kathryn Barton from the Carnegie Institution for Science in California.
Drought and ABA trigger several water conserving strategies in the plant: pores on the leaf close to prevent evaporation, growth is slowed and some leaves yellow and fall from the plant.
The new research identifies a protein as the agent that retards growth and causes leaves to yellow.
Un-watered plants without the crucial ABIG1 protein retain double the number of green leaves, are able to remain upright and retain a healthier root system.
Barton and colleagues hypothesize that reducing the amount of ABIG1 in the plant increases the threshold at which the plant triggers drastic water conserving measures.
Raising this threshold may be one way to breed plants that remain green and growing during short-term drought episodes.
Plants that retain their leaves are able to continue to provide nutrition from the environment to the parts of the plants that we harvest, for example to the seeds we use for food.

Most research on climate change ecology is limited to the impacts of a single climate variable, such as temperature or water availability, on one trophic level at a time — and often on a single species. For instance, many studies have shown that increasing carbon dioxide levels can increase plant growth. While such studies can provide important insights, this narrow approach can also be ecologically and climatically unrealistic, according to a new paper by Yale researchers. Writing in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, two Yale scholars make the case that overly simplistic studies or experiments avoid the inherent complexity and interconnectedness of natural systems. As a result, they can yield erroneous climate predictions, they write. “Most of the climate change ecology research out there has been picking the low-hanging fruit for many years,” said Adam Rosenblatt, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and lead author of the paper. “Often they study the effects of one type of variable. That’s obviously useful but it’s not realistic because in nature nothing exists in isolation.” The paper was co-authored by Oswald J. Schmitz, the Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology at F&ES. “The tradition in experimental analysis of climate change effects on ecosystems is to focus on one variable at a time. But this leads to a rather piecemeal and fragmentary picture of ecosystem functioning,” said Schmitz. “We propose a more integrative approach. While more complex, it will, nonetheless, help to unveil a more complete and coherent portrait of how real-world climate change will…

Because plants cannot relocate when resources become scarce, they need to efficiently regulate their growth by responding to environmental cues.
Drought is the most important cause of reduced plant growth and crop yield, which makes insights into a plant’s drought response highly valuable to agriculture.
The findings are published in the leading academic journal The Plant Cell.
Scientists predict that climate change will cause widespread agricultural problems, mainly in the form of drought — especially when fresh water and irrigation infrastructure are not available.
Extreme food shortages could be the result, making it very important for scientists to find new ways to protect crop plants against drought on a genetic level.
But before they can do this, they need to understand more about which genes are responsible for the changes in a plant’s growth rate under drought conditions.
Large-scale study uses the latest genetic analysis technologies Before this study — the largest of its kind — conducted by a team led by Professor Dirk Inzé, scientists had little insight into the genes and genetic processes that drive some plants to limit their growth under drought conditions while others grow normally.
Core genes affected by drought stress identified At a molecular level, even though the diversity in the drought responses of the different accessions was huge, only a small number of genes was affected in virtually all 100 types of Arabidopsis.
These genes are the core of a plant’s drought defense response.
Prof Inzé (VIB-Ghent University): "This study provided major insights into how plants cope with water-limiting conditions, which can direct advanced breeding and genome engineering efforts to create high-performing, drought-tolerant crop plants.

In science news this week: Innovative program builds partnerships, provides wildlife habitat; The ecology of non-native fish in the San Joaquin River; Turtles die in Southern California lake following drought and fire; Scientists link California droughts to distinctive atmospheric waves; Rivers, dams, and drive-by truckers; US streams carry surprising mixture of pollutants; 7 cool facts about water striders; An electric fix for removing long-lasting chemicals in groundwater; and Understanding Earth’s climate Innovative program builds partnerships, provides wildlife habitat: “As Rob Crawford drove around his property, something caught his eye.
… ” Read more from FishBio here: The ecology of non-native fish in the San Joaquin River Turtles die in Southern California lake following drought and fire: “Almost all of the turtles living in a southern California lake died following a large fire and years of drought, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey report published in the journal Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems.
… ” Read more from the USGS here: Turtles die in Southern California lake following drought and fire Scientists link California droughts to distinctive atmospheric waves: “The crippling wintertime droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015, as well as this year’s unusually wet California winter, appear to be associated with the same phenomenon: a distinctive wave pattern that emerges in the upper atmosphere and circles the globe.
… ” Read more from Climate.gov here: Scientists link California droughts to distinctive atmospheric waves Rivers, dams, and drive-by truckers: “When it comes to hydropower dams, the world is a pretty polarized place.
… ” Read more from the Cool Green Science blog here: Rivers, dams, and drive-by truckers US streams carry surprising mixture of pollutants: “Many U.S. waterways carry a variety of pollutants, but not much is known about the composition or health effects of these chemical combinations.
… ” Read more from Science Daily here: US streams carry surprising mixture of pollutants 7 cool facts about water striders: “Water striders are one of the most interesting and enjoyable aquatic creatures to observe.
There have been some 1,700 species of water striders identified.
These man-made materials have unique qualities that make them extremely useful.
… ” Read more from NASA here: Understanding Earth’s climate Maven’s XKCD Comic Pick of the Week … Sign up for daily email service and you’ll never miss a post!
About Science News and Reports: This weekly feature, posted every Thursday, is a collection of the latest scientific research and reports with a focus on relevant issues to the Delta and to California water, although other issues such as climate change are sometimes included.

New MutChromSeq technique makes valuable genes easier to find.
Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have applied an innovative technique to the analysis of wheat and barley genomes that makes it easier to pinpoint specific genes that might be used in crop improvement programmes.
Identifying the gene for an interesting trait that might help you breed better crops isn’t always easy — especially if you’re working with wheat or barley.
But scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have applied an innovative technique to the wheat and barley genomes that makes it easier to pinpoint specific genes that might be used in crop improvement programmes.
But locating the gene for a particular plant trait can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack — it’s a small, specific sequence of DNA mixed up in a jumble of other genes, regulatory sequences and non-coding DNA.
So how does MutChromSeq work?
"Take the bread wheat genome, for example: this has 21 chromosomes, so with flow sorting, we can separate Chromosome 1 from Chromosome 2, and from Chromosome 3, and so on.
Then, by running MutChromSeq analysis on these mutant plants, the sequence of the mutated chromosomes can be compared with that of the unmutated chromosome.
Dr Wulff said: "By looking for the differences in sequence between the mutated and wild-type chromosomes, we can identify genes without knowing anything about their structure beforehand.
Rapid gene isolation in barley and wheat by mutant chromosome sequencing.

A new comprehensive study of Australian natural hazards paints a picture of increasing heatwaves and extreme bushfires as this century progresses, but with much more uncertainty about the future of storms and rainfall.
Published in a special issue of the international journal Climatic Change, the study documents the historical record and projected change of seven natural hazards in Australia: flood; storms (including wind and hail); coastal extremes; drought; heatwave; bushfire; and frost.
"Temperature-related hazards, particularly heatwaves and bushfires, are increasing, and projections show a high level of agreement that we will continue to see these hazards become more extreme into the 21st century," says special issue editor Associate Professor Seth Westra, Head of the Intelligent Water Decisions group at the University of Adelaide.
"The study documents our current understanding of the relationship between historical and possible future climatic change with the frequency and severity of Australian natural hazards," says Associate Professor Westra.
"These hazards cause multiple impacts on humans and the environment and collectively account for 93% of Australian insured losses, and that does not even include drought losses.
The biggest risk from climate change is if we continue to plan as though there will be no change.
One thing is certain: our environment will continue to change."
• Heatwaves are Australia’s most deadly natural hazard, causing 55% of all natural disaster related deaths and increasing trends in heatwave intensity, frequency and duration are projected to continue throughout the 21st century.
• The costs of flooding have increased significantly in recent decades, but factors behind this increase include changes in reporting mechanisms, population, land-use, infrastructure as well as extreme rainfall events.
The physical size of floods has either not changed at all, or even decreased in many parts of the country.

"Their caterpillars defoliated 27,000 acres in Rhode Island in the spring of 2015, but even though we had winter moths everywhere last year and I saw a zillion eggs, they caused almost zero defoliation."
Faubert believes last year’s strange winter and spring weather negated what she expected to be a dire season for winter moth defoliation.
Winter moth eggs typically hatch during a warm spell in April, but last year they began hatching during a warm period in late March.
With little defoliation occurring last year from winter moths, Faubert said it’s possible that there will be fewer adult moths flying around in the next month.
"Defoliation is very stressful to trees," Faubert said.
The females crawl up tree trunks to lay their eggs.
In an experiment she conducted last year, Faubert placed two tree bands, separated by about a foot, around one tree.
One strategy Faubert is deploying to control winter moth populations is the release of a tiny parasitic fly that lays its eggs on tree leaves.
When the winter moth caterpillar consumes the eggs while eating the leaves, the eggs hatch inside the caterpillar and the fly larva eat it from the inside out.
Faubert released the flies in seven locations in Rhode Island between 2011 and 2015, and she hopes to soon see signs that it is beginning to work.