Drought is an insidious hazard of nature. It is often referred to as a ''creeping phenomenon,'' and its impacts vary from region to region. Studies show that the best approach to managing drought is to apply a comprehensive drought management plan. This system necessitates collecting reliable information to make decisions to decrease the risk and damages caused by drought. Therefore, the first step of the comprehensive drought management is accomplished by preparation of the drought vulnerability map. The main object of this study was to provide for agriculture drought vulnerability mapping for Taft town located in Yazd Province, Iran. To do so, with regard to factors affecting on agricultural drought, maps were prepared for each factor and analytic hierarchy process technique was applied to determine the importance of each map as an input parameter on agricultural drought vulnerability. All input maps and the output of this research, an agricultural drought vulnerability map, were provided and analyzed by geographic information systems.Then, to evaluate and validate how accurately the vulnerability map shows the degree of proneness to agricultural droughts, some ground control points (GCP) were taken into consideration. Results indicated that there is a good agreement between agricultural drought vulnerability map and GCPs in many cases. Also, results showed that mountainous regions of the study area are more vulnerable to agriculture droughts compared with plains. These results can be helpful for decision makers to mitigate agricultural drought impacts over the region, although implementing a drought risk management plan requires a detailed study covering different aspects of drought.

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Hybrid materials made of wide band gap semiconductors and dye molecules are largely studied mainly for photovoltaic applications. However, these materials also show interesting chemical sensitivity. Zinc oxides (ZnO) and porphyrins are good examples of a metal oxide semiconductor and a dye molecule that give rise to a hybrid material with such interesting properties. ZnO has been studied for sensors, optoelectronics, electronic devices, photo-anodes for dye-sensitized solar cells, and for mechanical energy harvesting. Porphyrins, on the other side, can be synthesized in order to mimic their roles in living systems such as oxygen transport and charge transfer for catalytic processes in animals and photosynthesis in plants. This paper provides a review of the chemical sensing properties of porphyrin-capped ZnO nanostructures. The methodologies to functionalize the ZnO surface with porphyrins are illustrated with emphasis on the relationships between the material preparation and its sensing properties. The development of sensors is described through the application of the hybrid materials to different transducers.

This study investigates the mechanical and physical properties of salep-based edible film. Samples of edible film with varying glycerol concentrations and dry material contents were prepared and studied. The results showed that increasing the dry material content in the film solution from 1% (w/v) to 2% (w/v) decreased water vapor permeability; however, increasing the dry material content from 2% (w/v) to 3% (w/v) increased water vapor permeability. Increasing the dry material and glycerol content increased the tensile strength from 11.82 to 24.5 MPa, the percentage of film length up to the breaking point from 16.16 to 94.3% and the salep edible film thickness from 0.021 to 0.060 mm. This research demonstrated that palmate tuber salep provides the required physical and mechanical properties to give it great potential for use in edible film production.

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