Climatic and environmental drivers on temporal-spatial variations of grain meteorological yield in high mountainous region

ABSTRACT

Development of sustainable mountain agriculture will require an increased understanding of the effects of climatic and environmental factors on grain yield. The objective of this study was to explore the drivers on variations of grain meteorological yield (MY) in Yunnan province, a typical high mountainous region. We used biological logistic regression model to simulate the trend yield to eliminate technological and management improvements effect. MY was calculated based on the data of actual grain yield (AGY) and trend yield. Our findings showed that during 1985–2012, MY showed an irregular fluctuation over time. Extreme temperature indices exerted a relatively greater impact on MY compared to extreme precipitation indices and annual precipitation. Spatially, topographic factors had higher direct effect on spatial variation of MY than that of extreme climate index, multi-year average temperature and precipitation, and soil properties. Redundancy analysis revealed that extreme temperature index (SU30) significantly affected inter-annual variation of MY, while spatial variation of MY was strongly influenced by slope, which can explain 44.62%. Our results illustrated the drivers on temporal-spatial variations of grain meteorological yield were inconsistent and topography effect should be considered when assessing the climatic change on crop yield in mountainous region.

KEYWORDS:

• Grain yield
• meteorological yield
• extreme climate index
• slope gradient
• plateau mountain region

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Kathryn B. Piatek and Yanbo Li for language editing and the reviewers’ helpful suggestions on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation Project of China (Grant number: 41867029, 41561063, 41401614) and the NSFC-ICIMOD Joint Research Program (Grant number: 41661144044).