Contributions of climatic and crop varietal changes to crop production in the North China Plain, since 1980s

Abstract

The North China Plain (NCP) is the most important agricultural production area in China. Crop production in the NCP is sensitive to changes in both climate and management practices. While previous studies showed a negative impact of climatic change on crop yield since 1980s, the confounding effects of climatic and agronomic factors have not been separately investigated. This paper used 25 years of crop data from three locations (Nanyang, Zhengzhou and Luancheng) across the NCP, together with daily weather data and crop modeling, to analyse the contribution of changes in climatic and agronomic factors to changes in grain yields of wheat and maize. The results showed that the changes in climate were not uniform across the NCP and during different crop growth stages. Warming mainly occurred during the vegetative (preflowering) growth stage of wheat and maize, while there was a cooling trend or no significant change in temperatures during the postflowering stage of wheat (spring) or maize (autumn). If varietal effects were excluded, warming during vegetative stages would lead to a reduction in the length of the growing period for both crops, generally leading to a negative impact on crop production. However, autonomous adoption of new crop varieties in the NCP was able to compensate the negative impact of climatic change. For both wheat and maize, the varietal changes helped stabilize the length of preflowering period against the shortening effect of warming and, together with the slightly reduced temperature in the postflowering period, extend the length of the grain-filling period. The combined effect led to increased wheat yield at Zhengzhou and Luancheng; increased maize yield at Nanyang and Luancheng; stabilized wheat yield at Nanyang, and a slight reduction in maize yield at Zhengzhou, compared with the yield change caused entirely by climatic change.

Responses of Single Cropping Rice Yields to Climate Change in Sichuan Province, China

“…This result was consistent with the finding in some other researches [7,17,18], which suggesting that temperature was above the optimal temperature of rice production and increasing temperature might reduce yield. However, T avg during RGS 2 and RGS 3 were significantly positively related to rice yield in some regions, which was consistent with other studies [12,19]. This result indicated that present T avg might be in the optimal temperature range and increasing temperature might increase yield.…”

“…However, Li et al [9] investigated the relationship between wheat yields and climate at different spatial scales of China, proposing that some unclear climate-yield relationships at a large scale would emerge if they were observed at a smaller scale. Some recent studies also pointed out that crop yields are not always negatively associated with an increased average temperature based on site observations in China [10][11][12]. Such observations are inherently inconclusive and dependent upon the selection of sites, thus making them difficult to represent a regional situation [7].…”

Towards groundwater neutral cropping systems in the Alluvial Fans of the North China Plain

“…To capture these drought stress effects in the plant and allow multi-year simulations, we chose to use a model with accurate representation of physiological responses to drought and a soil water balance that can be simulated continuously from one year to the other, also during fallows. The APSIM model (Keating et al, 2003) has been developed especially for semi-arid environments and has been extensively validated for wheat (Asseng et al, 1998a,b;Probert et al, 1998) and maize (Nelson et al, 1998), also in the North China Plain (Chen et al, 2010a,b;Liu et al, 2010). The model simulates crop growth and the soil water balance and can simulate a sequence of different crops with intermittent fallow periods.…”

Climate change impacts on crop yield: Evidence from China

“…A widely applied approach to estimating climate change impact on crop yield is crop simulation modeling (e.g., Lin et al, 2005;Liu et al, 2010;Tao et al, 2009;Xiong et al, 2012;Xiong et al, 2007;Zhang et al, 2013), where key socio-economic factors other than climate variables in crop production are typically out of consideration (Challinor et al, 2009). …”