Linking modelling and experimentation to better capture crop impacts of agroclimatic extremes—A review

• Published in: Field crops research Vol. 221; pp. 142 - 156
• Main Authors: Rötter, R.P., Appiah, M., Fichtler, E., Kersebaum, K.C., Trnka, M., Hoffmann, M.P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 15-05-2018
• Subjects: Agroclimatic extremes; Crop model; Drought; Heat; Heavy rain; Heat; Crop model; Drought; Heavy rain; Agroclimatic extremes
• ISSN: 0378-4290; 1872-6852
• DOI: 10.1016/j.fcr.2018.02.023

•Concentration on drought, heat, and three major staples increased over time.•CERES-DSSAT and APSIM predominate in modelling studies.•Targeted experiments are needed to address combined impact of multiple extremes.•Comparison of empirical statistical with process-based modelling considered mutually beneficial.•Iterative, linked model development and experimentation cycle as a way forward.
Climate change implies higher frequency and magnitude of agroclimatic extremes threatening plant production and the provision of other ecosystem services. This review is motivated by a mismatch between advances made regarding deeper understanding of abiotic stress physiology and its incorporation into ecophysiological models in order to more accurately quantifying the impacts of extreme events at crop system or higher aggregation levels.
Adverse agroclimatic extremes considered most detrimental to crop production include drought, heat, heavy rains/hail and storm, flooding and frost, and, in particular, combinations of them.
Our core question is: How have and could empirical data be exploited to improve the capability of widely used crop simulation models in assessing crop impacts of key agroclimatic extremes for the globally most important grain crops? To date there is no comprehensive review synthesizing available knowledge for a broad range of extremes, grain crops and crop models as a basis for identifying research gaps and prospects.
To address these issues, we selected eight major grain crops and performed three systematic reviews using SCOPUS for period 1995–2016. Furthermore, we amended/complemented the reviews manually and performed an in-depth analysis using a sub-sample of papers.
Results show that by far the majority of empirical studies (1631 out of 1772) concentrate on the three agroclimatic extremes drought, heat and heavy rain and on the three major staples wheat, maize and rice (1259 out of 1772); the concentration on just a few has increased over time. With respect to modelling studies two model families, i.e. CERES-DSSAT and APSIM, are clearly dominating for wheat and maize; for rice, ORYZA2000 and CERES-Rice predominate and are equally strong. For crops other than maize and wheat the number of studies is small. Empirical and modelling papers don’t differ much in the proportions the various extreme events are dealt with – drought and heat stress together account for approx. 80% of the studies. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of papers, especially after 2010.
As a way forward, we suggest to have very targeted and well-designed experiments on the specific crop impacts of a given extreme as well as of combinations of them. This in particular refers to extremes addressed with insufficient specificity (e.g. drought) or being under-researched in relation to their economic importance (heavy rains/storm and flooding). Furthermore, we strongly recommend extending research to crops other than wheat, maize and rice.