ABSTRACT
Crop plant adaptation to drought depends on the additive effects of drought escape and drought resistance. In considering the adaptation of crop plants to water-limited environments, it is useful to define drought and mechanisms of drought adaptation such as drought escape and drought resistance. Indeterminate plants, such as cotton, cowpea, and tomatoes, can exhibit superior adaptation to mid-season droughts than determinate plants, such as maize, pearl millet, rice, sorghum, and wheat. The significance of feedforward responses to crop production is that they may be too strong and favor plant survival too much over plant productivity and thus be too conservative for annual crop plants in most target production environments. Drought resulted in slower silk elongation at night compared with well-watered plants and caused silks to shrink during the day, when leaf water potentials were even more negative than for the well-watered plants. The small bonsai plants do not manifest any obvious symptoms of water-deficit or nutrient stress.
