University of Tasmania
Browse

Silver lining to a climate crisis in multiple prospects for alleviating crop waterlogging under future climates

Download (6.27 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 16:22 authored by Ke LiuKe Liu, Matthew HarrisonMatthew Harrison, Yan, H, Liu, LL, Holger MeinkeHolger Meinke, Hoogenboom, G, Wang, B, Peng, B, Guan, K, Jaegermeyr, J, Wang, E, Zhang, F, Yin, X, Archontoulis, S, Nie, L, Badea, A, Man, J, Wallach, D, Zhao, J, Benjumea, AB, Fahad, S, Tian, X, Wang, W, Toa, F, Zhang, Z, Rotter, R, Yuan, Y, Zhu, M, Dai, P, Nie, J, Yang, Y, Zhang, Y, Meixue ZhouMeixue Zhou
Extreme weather events threaten food security, yet global assessments of impacts caused by crop waterlogging are rare. Here we first develop a paradigm that distils common stress patterns across environments, genotypes and climate horizons. Second, we embed improved process-based understanding into a farming systems model to discern changes in global crop waterlogging under future climates. Third, we develop avenues for adapting cropping systems to waterlogging contextualised by environment. We find that yield penalties caused by waterlogging increase from 3-11% historically to 10-20% by 2080, with penalties reflecting a trade-off between the duration of waterlogging and the timing of waterlogging relative to crop stage. We document greater potential for waterlogging-tolerant genotypes in environments with longer temperate growing seasons (e.g., UK, France, Russia, China), compared with environments with higher annualised ratios of evapotranspiration to precipitation (e.g., Australia). Under future climates, altering sowing time and adoption of waterlogging-tolerant genotypes reduces yield penalties by 18%, while earlier sowing of winter genotypes alleviates waterlogging by 8%. We highlight the serendipitous outcome wherein waterlogging stress patterns under present conditions are likely to be similar to those in the future, suggesting that adaptations for future climates could be designed using stress patterns realised today.

Funding

Grains Research & Development Corporation

History

Publication title

Nature Communications

Volume

14

Article number

765

Number

765

Pagination

1-13

ISSN

2041-1723

Department/School

Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA)

Publisher

Nature Pub. Group

Place of publication

England

Rights statement

© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Climate change adaptation measures (excl. ecosystem); Climatological hazards (e.g. extreme temperatures, drought and wildfires); Global effects of climate change (excl. Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and the South Pacific) (excl. social impacts)