Impact of heat stress on crop yield—on the importance of considering canopy temperature

By Stefan Siebert, Frank Ewert, Ehsan Eyshi Rezaei, Henning Kage, Rikard Graß. 2014

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing crop productivity while simultaneously reducing the environmental footprint of crop production is considered a major challenge for the coming decades. Even short episodes of heat stress can reduce crop yield considerably causing low resource use efficiency. Studies on the impact of heat stress on crop yields over larger regions generally rely on temperatures measured by standard weather stations at 2 m height. Canopy temperatures measured in this study in field plots of rye were up to 7 °C higher than air temperature measured at typical weather station height with the differences in temperatures controlled by soil moisture contents. Relationships between heat stress and grain number derived from controlled environment studies were only confirmed under field conditions when canopy temperature was used to calculate stress thermal time. By using hourly mean temperatures measured by 78 weather stations located across Germany for the period 1994–2009 it is estimated, that mean yield declines in wheat due to heat stress during flowering were 0.7% when temperatures are measured at 2 m height, but yield declines increase to 22% for temperatures measured at the ground. These results suggest that canopy temperature should be simulated or estimated to reduce uncertainty in assessing heat stress impacts on crop yield.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1efd5cc385041a03af4ea67cc8de91306d5a66f9

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Wheat yield loss attributable to heat waves, drought and water excess at the global, national and subnational scales (2017, background): “Furthermore, wheat physiology is sensitive to the temperature of its canopy, which might be higher than the 2m temperature (the commonly available variable in the observational data sets) in unstably stratified surface layers, especially above arid soils (Siebert et al 2014).”
The impact of climate extremes and irrigation on US crop yields (2015, background): “Observed data collected through a controlled environmental experiment in Germany has confirmed the impacts of heat stress on rye and wheat yield decline (Siebert et al 2014).”
Comparing estimates of climate change impacts from process-based and statistical crop models (2017, background): “…have projected large negative impacts (Schlenker and Roberts 2009) and several authors have emphasized the simplicity or complete lack of treatment of high temperature effects in some prominent process-based models (e.g. White et al 2011, Asseng et al 2011, Lobell et al 2012, Siebert et al 2014).”