What is statistical relationship between climatic factors changes and rice production at agro-subzone and nationwide levels during the period 1961-2040 based on remote sensing and GIS?

• Published in: 2016 Fifth International Conference on Agro-Geoinformatics (Agro-Geoinformatics) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: He, Yingbin, Zhou, Zhenya, Gao, Mingjie, Liu, Yang, Cai, Weimin, Chen, Jingzhu, Zhang, Lei
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-07-2016
• Subjects: Agriculture; Brain modeling; Climate change; food security; Meteorology; precipitation; Production; rice yields; Security; sunshine duration; temperature; Temperature distribution
• DOI: 10.1109/Agro-Geoinformatics.2016.7577659

Rice is one of the most important staple food crops in China. Climate change is a major contributing factor leading to uncertainty and variability in rice growth. In this paper, we applied linear correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis to analyze the relationships between compound annual rice yield growth rates derived from remote sensing and GIS and climate change rates of temperature, precipitation and sunshine duration for three decadal comparisons spanning the period of 1961-2040. Spatial scales were defined at the national and agro-subzone levels. Based on these results, we obtained the following conclusions: (1) individual climatic factors have different change characteristics over time, whereas the spatial heterogeneity of precipitation and temperature changes will influence policy options for ensuring food security; (2) individual climatic factors did not significantly influence rice yields at any spatial scale or for any temporal comparison; (3) a combination of temperature, precipitation and sunshine duration explained more than 90% of the changes in rice yields at the national and subzone levels of south and central China in the comparison between 1961-1990 and 2010-2020; (4) it is difficult to project rice yields changes using only the three climatic factors for the 2010-2040 period; and (5) the effects of the different climatic factors on rice yields are different at different spatial scales and for different decadal comparisons.