Recently, Shengchao and his coauthors (Dr. Han Wang, Pro. I. Colin Prentice and Pro. Sandy P. Harrison) published a new paper on Agricultural and Forest Meteorology to introduce their novel, simply formulated crop model (PC model).
Ongoing climate change (characterized by increasing temperature and rising CO2 concentration) has a major impact on crop growth and yields. Thus studying how crops (e.g. wheat) growth response to environmental factors is critical to maintaining food security. Crop models as the effective means were widely to study the response of crop growth to the environmental conditions. However, the current crop models are too complicated with requiring detailed input information hard to collect and have large uncertainties on predictions.
To avoid these problems, Shengchao and his coauthors proposed a simply formulated crop model, which was based on a first-principles primary production model proposed by Wang et al. and integrated the empirical relationship derived from observations. Using this simple model, Shengchao and his coauthors reproduced the change trend of what yields from 2005 to 2015 at six agricultural sites located in major wheat-growing regions of China, and studied the effects of increasing temperature and rising CO2 concentration on wheat yields. They found that rising CO2 concentration had positive effects on wheat yield, but this positive effect would be partially counteracted by the negative response of wheat yields to increasing temperature. Further, they applied this model to project future wheat yields (2006-2099) under different combinations of increasing temperature and CO2 concentration. The results showed that the prediction of PC model (magnitude and interannual change trend of wheat yield) was similar with complex crop models, such as LPJmL.
Although, PC model exhibited a good performance in China region, further verification in other regions with different conditions (climate and management practice) will be still needed to test the generality of this simple model. And now they are working on these analyses.
The link of paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2020.107932