Using a Climate Index to Measure Crop Yield Response

Principal Component Analysis of Crop Yield Response to Climate Change

Crop and pasture response to climate change.

We review recent research of importance to understanding crop and pasture plant species response to climate change. Topics include plant response to elevated CO(2) concentration, interactions with climate change variables and air pollutants, impacts of increased climate variability and frequency of extreme events, the role of weeds and pests, disease and animal health, issues in biodiversity, a...

Climate variation explains a third of global crop yield variability

Many studies have examined the role of mean climate change in agriculture, but an understanding of the influence of inter-annual climate variations on crop yields in different regions remains elusive. We use detailed crop statistics time series for ~13,500 political units to examine how recent climate variability led to variations in maize, rice, wheat and soybean crop yields worldwide. While s...

Ants and termites increase crop yield in a dry climate

Agricultural intensification has increased crop yields, but at high economic and environmental cost. Harnessing ecosystem services of naturally occurring organisms is a cheaper but under-appreciated approach, because the functional roles of organisms are not linked to crop yields, especially outside the northern temperate zone. Ecosystem services in soil come from earthworms in these cooler and...

Ensemble yield simulations: crop and climate uncertainties, sensitivity to temperature and genotypic adaptation to climate change

Estimates of the response of crops to climate change rarely quantify the uncertainty inherent in the simulation of both climate and crops. We present a crop simulation ensemble for a location in India, perturbing the response of both crop and climate under both baseline (12 720 simulations) and doubled-CO2 (171 720 simulations) climates. Some simulations used parameter values representing genot...