Drought effects on US maize and soybean production: spatiotemporal patterns and historical changes
By Samuel C. Zipper, Jiangxiao Qiu, Christopher J. Kucharik. 2016
297 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Maximizing agricultural production on existing cropland is one pillar of meeting future global food security needs. To close crop yield gaps, it is critical to understand how climate extremes such as drought impact yield. Here, we use gridded, daily meteorological data and county-level annual yield data to quantify meteorological drought sensitivity of US maize and soybean production from 1958 to 2007. Meteorological drought negatively affects crop yield over most US crop-producing areas, and yield is most sensitive to short-term (1–3 month) droughts during critical development periods from July to August. While meteorological drought is associated with 13% of overall yield variability, substantial spatial variability in drought effects and sensitivity exists, with central and southeastern US becoming increasingly sensitive to drought over time. Our study illustrates fine-scale spatiotemporal patterns of drought effects, highlighting where variability in crop production is most strongly associated with drought, and suggests that management strategies that buffer against short-term water stress may be most effective at sustaining long-term crop productivity.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9b19ce87d45d8cd50659912f4d8ded1e7255b41
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Changes in the severity of compound drought and hot extremes over global land areas (2018, background): “Drought and hot extremes are among the most detrimental extremeswith impacts on agriculture, water availability, energy production, and human health (Mishra and Singh 2010, Deryng et al 2014, Zipper et al 2016, Añel et al 2017, Dosio et al 2018).”
- Recent increasing frequency of compound summer drought and heatwaves in Southeast Brazil (2021, background): “The progressive intensification of these compound extremes represents one of the largest challenges in climate change [8, 9], and may be responsible for a wide range of natural and socioeconomic impacts, such as heat-related mortality [10], severe wildfires [11], air pollution [12], agricultural los”