Rivers and boreholes are running dry, crops failing, traditional grazing land turning to dust.
Millet, wheat, and cotton are the locality's chief dry crops, and sugarcane ranks as the most important irrigated crop.
Although much of Cambodia is heavily forested, the central lowland region is covered with rice paddies, fields of dry crops such as corn (maize) and tobacco, tracts of tall grass and reeds, and thinly wooded areas.
Most of the area is under cultivation, especially for raising dry crops and limited paddy cultivation.
In spring, habitat variables (i.e. percentage of dry crops and pasturelands and altitude) ruled species' distribution; while, winter pattern was driven by mixed criteria, based on both habitat and climate (i.e. percentage of dry crops and wastelands and winter rainfall).
At every site, samples of the same soil type were collected from agricultural land (dry crops with conventional tillage management using ploughing), and nearby forest, where agriculture was abandoned between 20 and 50 years ago.
It seems likely that during the early contact period with South Asia (300 BCE onwards), Thailand already had an established rice agricultural regime primarily focused on dry cropping in low-lying areas and the rice grown was japonica.
The available weed data from the Ganges suggest that early rice cultivation was essentially dry cropping, based on monsoon rains and seasonal flood recession, but that plausible wet field irrigated rice may have been grown by the end of the second millennium BC and certainly by the Iron Age (Fuller and Qin 2009).
The on-farm reservoir (OFR) is used to harvest the surplus water from the diked crop field and recycle the stored water as supplemental irrigation to rice in monsoon (rainy) and non-rice (dry) crops in winter season under rainfed farming system.
Both analytical approaches show that the Dupont's lark favours flat areas characterized by small shrubs with bare ground, so that, for example, a conversion of dry crops to shrubs promoted by agri-environment schemes under CAP could increase the population size up to 80%.
Sivakasi has a dry weather, making it suitable for dry crops like cotton, chillies and millets.
