The good news: As of Dec. 27, only 32 percent of the state is still in the worst drought stage, down from 88 percent in early October.
In Sacramento County, the Carmichael Water District had banned filling new swimming pools but later moved the restriction to a more severe drought stage after officials realized that the district's customers had already reduced their overall water use by 20%.
Genes found to be induced in response to drought stress in our dataset (>2.5-fold) were predominantly down-regulated when differentially expressed in the hsi2 mutant (vs. Col-0) at stage 2 (>92%), while genes repressed by drought were mostly up-regulated (93%) when differentially expressed in the hsi2 mutant at this drought stage (Additional file 3).
They argued that if the "going gets tough", the District would declare higher drought severity stages and then they would have to implement the rationing measures foreseen in the regional drought plan.
Even in early developmental stages drought stress and drought stress induced premature leaf senescence have major influences on yield formation [ 16].
Genes corresponding to 441 unique AGIs were identified as being differentially expressed (p ≤ 0.05, 1.5-fold cut-off) at stage 0, and the numbers of differentially expressed unique AGIs increased with the severity of drought to 785 (stage 1) and 1400 (stage 2) (Additional files 2 and 3).
The response to drought in juvenile stages is less well documented, as only few studies are focused on early developmental stages [ 20, 24, 46, 47] whereas a lot of studies were conducted for drought stress in the generative stage [ 48].
Against this, only 248 (0.88%) (Fig. 8b) and 110 (0.49%) (Fig. 8c) accessions were found to be highly tolerant in early or late vegetative stages drought screening.
In the field, the response of plants to soil water deficits can be divided into three continuous stages (Drought Frontier Project 1999).
The commonness of drought resistant resting stages in many aquatic organisms shows the ecological significance of droughts.
