Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Extreme heat effects on wheat senescence in India

Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages 186–189 (2012)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures1,2. This uncertainty partly reflects the relative lack of observations of crop behaviour in farmers’ fields under extreme heat. We used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India to monitor rates of wheat senescence following exposure to temperatures greater than 34 °C. We detect a statistically significant acceleration of senescence from extreme heat, above and beyond the effects of increased average temperatures. Simulations with two commonly used process-based crop models indicate that existing models underestimate the effects of heat on senescence. As the onset of senescence is an important limit to grain filling, and therefore grain yields, crop models probably underestimate yield losses for +2 °C by as much as 50% for some sowing dates. These results imply that warming presents an even greater challenge to wheat than implied by previous modelling studies, and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce crop sensitivity to very hot days.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: The study region of the IGP in northern India.
Figure 2: The effects of GDD and EDD on GSL in the study area for 2000–2009.
Figure 3: Comparison of MODIS-based responses to crop models.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Wardlaw, I. & Wrigley, C. Heat tolerance in temperate cereals: An overview. Aust. J. Plant Physiol. 21, 695–703 (1994).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Asseng, S., Foster, I. & Turner, N. C. The impact of temperature variability on wheat yields. Glob. Change Biol. 17, 997–1012 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ritchie, J. T. & NeSmith, D. S. in Modeling Plant and Soil Systems Vol. 31 (eds Hanks, J. & Ritchie, J. T.) 5–29 (American Society of Agronomy, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Tashiro, T. & Wardlaw, I. F. A comparison of the effect of high temperature on grain development in wheat and rice. Ann. Bot. 64, 59–65 (1989).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Wardlaw, I. & Moncur, L. The response of wheat to high temperature following anthesis. I. The rate and duration of kernel filling. Funct. Plant Biol. 22, 391–397 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Sofield, I., Evans, L., Cook, M. & Wardlaw, I. Factors influencing the rate and duration of grain filling in wheat. Funct. Plant Biol. 4, 785–797 (1977).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Zhao, H., Dai, T., Jing, Q., Jiang, D. & Cao, W. Leaf senescence and grain filling affected by post-anthesis high temperatures in two different wheat cultivars. Plant Growth Regul. 51, 149–158 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Harding, S. A., Guikema, J. A. & Paulsen, G. M. Photosynthetic decline from high temperature stress during maturation of wheat: I. Interaction with senescence processes. Plant Physiol. 92, 648–653 (1990).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Reynolds, M. P., Balota, M., Delgado, M. I. B., Amani, I. & Fischer, R. A. Physiological and morphological traits associated with spring wheat yield under hot, irrigated conditions. Aust. J. Plant Physiol. 21, 717–730 (1994).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Al-Khatib, K. & Paulsen, G. M. Mode of high temperature injury to wheat during grain development. Physiol. Plant. 61, 363–368 (1984).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. Al-Khatib, K. & Paulsen, G. M. High-temperature effects on photosynthetic processes in temperate and tropical cereals. Crop Sci. 39, 119–125 (1999).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Gupta, R. et al. Wheat productivity in indo-gangetic plains of India during 2010: Terminal heat effects and mitigation strategies. PACA Newsletter 14, 1–11 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Wilkens, P. & Singh, U. in Modeling Temperature Response in Wheat and Maize (ed. White, J. W.) 1–7 (CIMMYT, 2001).

    Google Scholar 

  14. Stone, P. & Nicolas, M. Wheat cultivars vary widely in their responses of grain yield and quality to short periods of post-anthesis heat stress. Funct. Plant Biol. 21, 887–900 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Ferris, R., Ellis, R., Wheeler, T. & Hadley, P. Effect of high temperature stress at anthesis on grain yield and biomass of field-grown crops of wheat. Ann. Bot. 82, 631–639 (1998).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Zwiers, F. W., Zhang, X. & Feng, Y. Anthropogenic influence on long return period daily temperature extremes at regional scales. J. Clim. 24, 881–892 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Meehl, G. A. et al. in IPCC Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (eds Solomon, S. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Betts, R. A. et al. When could global warming reach 4 °C? Phil. Tran. R. Soc. A 369, 67–84 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  19. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fertilizer Use by Crop in India (FAO, 2005).

  20. Randhawa, A., Dhillon, S. & Singh, D. Productivity of wheat varieties as influenced by the time of sowing. J. Res. Punjab Agr. Univ. 18, 227–233 (1981).

    Google Scholar 

  21. Aggarwal, P. K. & Kalra, N. Analyzing the limitations set by climatic factors, genotype, and water and nitrogen availability on productivity of wheat. 2. Climatically potential yields and management strategies. Field Crop. Res. 38, 93–103 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Chandna, P. et al. Increasing the Productivity of Underutilized Lands by Targeting Resource Conserving Technologies-A GIS/Remote Sensing Approach: A Case Study of Ballia District, Uttar Pradesh, in the Eastern Gangetic Plains 43 (CIMMYT, 2004).

  23. Fujisaka, S., Harrington, L. & Hobbs, P. Rice-wheat in South Asia: Systems and long-term priorities established through diagnostic research. Agr. Syst. 46, 169–187 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Ortiz-Monasterio, J. I., Dhillon, S. S. & Fischer, R. A. Date of sowing effects on grain-yield and yield components of irrigated spring wheat cultivars and relationships with radiation and temperature in Ludhiana, India. Field Crop. Res. 37, 169–184 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. van Oort, P. A. J., Zhang, T., de Vries, M. E., Heinemann, A. B. & Meinke, H. Correlation between temperature and phenology prediction error in rice (Oryza sativa L.). Agr. Forest Meteorol. 151, 1545–1555 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Monfreda, C., Ramankutty, N. & Foley, J. A. Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 22, GB1022 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Mitchell, T. D. & Jones, P. D. An improved method of constructing a database of monthly climate observations and associated high-resolution grids. Int. J. Climatol. 25, 693–712 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Hsiang, S. M. Temperatures and cyclones strongly associated with economic production in the Caribbean and Central America. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 15367–15372 (2010).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  29. Lobell, D. B. et al. Analysis of wheat yield and climatic trends in Mexico. Field Crop. Res. 94, 250–256 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank the APSIM team for providing their model and S. Hsiang for providing the code to estimate heteroskedasticity- and autocorrelation-consistent standard errors. This work was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and NASA New Investigator grant no. NNX08AV25G to D.B.L.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Earth System Science and Program on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA

    David B. Lobell & Adam Sibley

  2. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Global Conservation Agriculture Program, 06600 Mexico D.F., Apdo. Postal 6-641, Mexico

    J. Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio

Authors
  1. David B. Lobell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Adam Sibley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. J. Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

D.B.L. conceived the study, D.B.L. and A.S. analysed data, A.S. carried out crop model simulations, and D.B.L., A.S. and J.I.O-M. interpreted results and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David B. Lobell.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Lobell, D., Sibley, A. & Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio, J. Extreme heat effects on wheat senescence in India. Nature Clim Change 2, 186–189 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1356

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1356

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing