How Do Droughts Impact the Ecosystem?
Droughts have typically test organisms ability to survive. It's the imbalance between the available water and the demand for it. Droughts are caused by a lack of precipitation or a reduction in water reserves with an increase in demand. There are many negative impacts on the systematic.
Drought is the most costly natural disaster according to the Natural Coalition for Food and Agricultural Research. They estimate it costs from $6 to $8 billion a year from crop and livestock loss among other impacts.
Over time, drought can weaken an ecosystem by stressing plant and animal resources. Flora and fauna (plants and animals of that particular region) are not able to find adequate resources and more vulnerable to predation and disease. A widespread drought can impact entire populations. Dry conditions can also increase the number of wildfires. The land can also become infertile due to the fact that the roots that once held the soil withered away because of the lack of water and that top soil will be eroded away. The drought can also disrupt the water cycle because if there's no evaporation, there's no precipitation.
Drought is the most costly natural disaster according to the Natural Coalition for Food and Agricultural Research. They estimate it costs from $6 to $8 billion a year from crop and livestock loss among other impacts.
Over time, drought can weaken an ecosystem by stressing plant and animal resources. Flora and fauna (plants and animals of that particular region) are not able to find adequate resources and more vulnerable to predation and disease. A widespread drought can impact entire populations. Dry conditions can also increase the number of wildfires. The land can also become infertile due to the fact that the roots that once held the soil withered away because of the lack of water and that top soil will be eroded away. The drought can also disrupt the water cycle because if there's no evaporation, there's no precipitation.
Droughts in Texas
The Dust Bowl was a period of sever dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought combined with a failure to apply dry land farming methods to prevent wind erosion. The drought and erosion affected a hundred million acres, centered around the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, among other sections of states. Hundred of thousands of people were forced to leave their farms where they found economic conditions little better than those they had left, due to the Great Depression.
"In 2011, Texas experienced an exceptional drought, prolonged high winds, and record-setting temperatures," Forest Service Sustainable Forestry chief Burl Carraway told Reuters on Tuesday. "Together, those conditions took a severe toll on trees across the state."
The meanest drought looks different in the rural than in urban areas. Livestock and agricultural losses are already estimated at $5.2 billion, and expected to rise. Stock tanks have dried up, hungry cattle are being rushed to market, crops plowed under. Wildfires have touched more than 3.4 million acres. Deer are abandoning their young and oak trees have weathered away. The state's aquifers that supply 60 percent of its water supply are dropping. The Sabine, in normally lush East Texas, is at an all-time low. The U.S. Drought Monitor map shows the drought covering almost all of Texas. In the past 12 months only 15 inches of rain have fallen.