Campus Units

Agronomy, Economics, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2015

Journal or Book Title

Environmental Research Letters

Volume

10

Issue

2

First Page or Article ID Number

124001

Last Page

124008

DOI

10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/124001

Abstract

Plant water availability is a key factor that determines maize yield response to excess heat. Lack of available data has limited researchers' ability to estimate this relationship at regional and global scales. Using a new soil moisture data set developed by running a crop growth simulator over historical data we demonstrate how current estimates of maize yield sensitivity to high temperature are misleading. We develop an empirical model relating observed yields to climate variables and soil moisture in a high maize production region in the United States to develop bounds on yield sensitivity to high temperatures. For the portion of the region with a relatively long growing season, yield reduction per °C is 10% for high water availability and 32.5% for low water availability. Where the growing season is shorter, yield reduction per °C is 6% for high water availability and 27% for low water availability. These results indicate the importance of using both water availability and temperature to model crop yield response to explain future climate change on crop yields.

Comments

This article is from Environmental Research Letters 10 (2015): 124001, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/124001 . Posted with permission.

Rights

Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Copyright Owner

IOP Publishing Ltd

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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