Impact of high temperatures in maize: Phenology and yield components

Abstract

Heat stress is a main threat to current and future global maize production. Adaptation of maize to future warmer conditions requires improving our understanding of crop responses to elevated temperatures. For this purpose, the same short-season (FAO 300) maize hybrid PR37N01 was grown over three years of field experiments on three contrasting Spanish locations in terms of temperature regime. The information complemented three years of greenhouse experiments with the same hybrid, applying heat treatments at various critical moments of the crop cycle. Crop phenology, growth, grain yield, and yield components were monitored. An optimized beta function improved the calculation of thermal time compared to the linear-cutoff estimator with base and optimum temperatures of 8 and 34 °C, respectively. Our results showed that warmer temperatures accelerate development rate resulting in shorter vegetative and reproductive phases (ca. 30 days for the whole cycle). Heat stress did not cause silking delay in relation to anthesis (extended anthesis-silking interval), at least in the range of temperatures (maximum temperature up to 42.9 °C in the field and up to 52.5 °C in the greenhouse) considered in this study. Our results indicated that maize grain yield is reduced under heat stress mainly via pollen viability that in turn determines kernel 2 number, although a smaller but significant effect of the female component has been also detected.

Climate Change Impacts on Corn Phenology and Productivity

“…Increasing temperatures likely to be experienced under climate change demonstrate several negative effects plant growth and phenology. Lizaso et al [24] recorded a reduction of corn yield under field and controlled Corn -Production and Human Health in Changing Climate conditions owing to reduced pollen viability as impacted by increased temperatures. A critical knowledge gap under future climate scenarios will be to evaluate the interaction of high temperature and increased humidity on pollen survivability and the efficiency of the pollination process.…”

Dissecting the nonlinear response of maize yield to high temperature stress with model‐data integration

“…The observed variation in maize yield is the product of many interactive processes that make a mechanistic understanding of the drivers of this variation difficult. Throughout the life cycle of maize plants, yield is driven by biomass accumulation and partitioning between organs (Lizaso et al, ). Biomass accumulation can be expressed as growing season length (GSL) average daily biomass growth rate (BGR).…”

Genetic Mapping of Foliar and Tassel Heat Stress Tolerance in Maize

“…(Mittler et al, 2012), but research in the field setting (in situ) is lacking. The majority of in situ HS studies conducted in maize have focused on evaluating and comparing genotypes, not on quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping (Jodage et al, 2017;Akula et al, 2018;Lizaso et al, 2018). The lack of mapping studies is understandable, as heat waves are sporadic and of variable severity, making heat a difficult stress to study.…”

“…In B73 ´ NC350, two tassel traits, tassel blasting and reduction in spikelet size, were scored at flowering. The majority of in situ HS studies conducted in maize have focused on evaluating and comparing genotypes, not on quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping (Jodage et al, 2017;Akula et al, 2018;Lizaso et al, 2018). We previously observed that the development of leaf firing was differentiable between parents, and indeed, the different manifestations of the leaf firing trait were not significantly correlated and QTL did not co-localize.…”