Speaker
Description
Increasing and heat and drought are major abiotic stressors threatening European cereal yields under climate change. So far little is known about the spatio-temporal yield effect of these stressors (Lüttger and Feike, 2018). In this study, we assess genotype (G) × environment (E) × management (M) specific weather-yield relations utilizing spatially explicit weather indices (WIs) and variety trial yield data of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) and winter rye (Secale cereale) for all German cereal growing regions and the period 1993–2021. The objectives of this study are to determine the explanatory power of different heat and drought WIs in wheat and rye, to quantify their site-specific yield effects, and to examine the development of stress tolerance from old to new varieties. We use mixed linear models with G × E × M specific covariates as fixed and random factors. We find for both crops that combined heat and drought WIs have the strongest explanatory power during the reproductive phase. Furthermore, our results strongly emphasize the importance of site conditions regarding climate resilience, where poor sites reveal two to three times higher yield losses than sites with high soil quality and high annual precipitation in both crops. Under good site-conditions heat and drought stress hardly cause any significant yield losses. Finally, our analysis reveals significantly higher stress-induced absolute yield losses in modern vs. older varieties for both crops, while relative losses also significantly increased in wheat but did not change in rye. Our findings highlight the importance of site conditions and the value of high-yielding locations for global food security. They further underscore the need to integrate site-specific considerations more effectively into agricultural strategies and breeding programs.
References
Lüttger, A.B. and Feike, T. (2018) Development of heat and drought related extreme weather events and their effect on winter wheat yields in Germany Theor. Appl. Climatol. 132 15–29
| Keywords | weather index; heat stress; drought stress; winter wheat; winter rye; variety trial data |
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