Wheat yield loss attributable to heat waves, drought and water excess at the global, national and subnational scales

By M. Zampieri, Andrej Ceglar, F. Dentener, A. Toreti. 2017

590 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Heat waves and drought are often considered the most damaging climatic stressors for wheat. In this study, we characterize and attribute the effects of these climate extremes on wheat yield anomalies (at global and national scales) from 1980 to 2010. Using a combination of up-to-date heat wave and drought indexes (the latter capturing both excessively dry and wet conditions), we have developed a composite indicator that is able to capture the spatio-temporal characteristics of the underlying physical processes in the different agro-climatic regions of the world. At the global level, our diagnostic explains a significant portion (more than 40%) of the inter-annual production variability. By quantifying the contribution of national yield anomalies to global fluctuations, we have found that just two concurrent yield anomalies affecting the larger producers of the world could be responsible for more than half of the global annual fluctuations. The relative importance of heat stress and drought in determining the yield anomalies depends on the region. Moreover, in contrast to common perception, water excess affects wheat production more than drought in several countries. We have also performed the same analysis at the subnational level for France, which is the largest wheat producer of the European Union, and home to a range of climatic zones. Large subnational variability of inter-annual wheat yield is mostly captured by the heat and water stress indicators, consistently with the country-level result.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43d0c6fd5f44afb6a4996046d1b7065bf9376bc2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. Paul C. West
2. D. Ray
3. James Gerber
4. Patrick Meyfroidt

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Alexander V. Prishchepov
2. Michael A. Clark

Citations in the corpus

• Climate change has likely already affected global food production (2019, background): “We tracked ~20,000 political units globally for 10 crops, providing more detail on the spatial resolution and a larger number of crops than previously studied [3, 11, 14, 19].”