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• Information of cotton production and climate change impacts is extremely limited. • Systematic inquiries are used to assess how climate change affect cotton production. • Validating by field & satellite data, APSIM predict cotton lint and biomass well. • Reduced reliable yield and precipitation productivity were found in future scenarios. • Planting cotton on the most dominant soil type tended to meet higher risk than others. Assessing the potential of using process-based models combined with remote sensing and climate change scenarios to understand potential climate change impacts on rainfed cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) productivity is crucial for major production areas, such as the East-Central Texas. This study incorporated these methods to study the impacts of future climate on biomass production, crop development, lint yield, and water use efficiency in a Texas rainfed cotton system. Based on two-years of field data obtained from a rainfed cotton field (12 ha), APSIM accurately predicted cotton biomass and lint yield during the calibration (NRMSE: biomass, 17.6%; lint, 10.8%) and validation (NRMSE: biomass, 18.8%; lint, 13.1%) processes. The deviation between simulated and observed development stages as days after sowing was less than 6 days across squaring, flowering, and boll maturity stages. A partial least square model was constructed based on satellite NDVI data and development stage accurately predicted cotton biomass (R2 = 0.93, P < 0.05), and the results agreed well with the predicted values of APSIM (R2 = 0.96, P < 0.05), which was calibrated by the cotton biomass derived from NDVI. Decreased yield was detected in almost all RCP scenarios, with the greater reductions in end-century (29.9–82.4%) scenarios than mid-century (16.2–46.7%) scenarios. For precipitation productivity, 14–80.3% of reduction was found across all future scenarios. A great reduction in reliable yield (45.0–92.0%) and reliable precipitation productivity (37.6–84.7%) were projected by future scenarios. Slight differences were detected in model validation between the two dominant soil types present at the study location; however these differences were much greater under future projections (P < 0.05), largely caused by differences in water holding capacity during critical growth stages. The results from this study suggest that future managerial and breeding efforts that focus on water use efficiency enhancement should be promoted in the future. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a survey of 165 teachers of students with visual impairments in Texas to examine their perceptions of their knowledge of assistive technology. The results showed that they had significant deficits in knowledge in 55 (74.32%) of the 74 assistive technology competencies that were examined and that 57.5% of them lacked adequate confidence about teaching assistive technology to students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]