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Crop asynchrony stabilizes food production

Nature volume 588, pages E7–E12 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 09 December 2020

The Original Article was published on 19 June 2019

arising from D. Renard & D. Tilman Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1316-y (2019)

Stable agricultural systems are fundamental for the reliability of agricultural production and food security. Recently, Renard and Tilman1 reported that crop diversity, calculated as the exponential value of the Shannon diversity index of harvested areas of 176 crops, stabilizes national food production. Here we show that crop asynchrony—that is, asynchronous production trends between different crops2—is an even better predictor of agricultural production stability than is crop diversity. Our finding suggests that asynchrony is one important property that can explain why a higher crop diversity supports the stability of national food production, and that it should be considered in strategies to stabilize agricultural production through crop diversification.

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Fig. 1: Crop asynchrony as a function of crop diversity and determinants of national caloric production stability.
Fig. 2: National crop asynchrony and caloric production stability worldwide.

Data availability

All datasets used and generated during this study are provided in a public repository: https://github.com/legli/AgriculturalStability.

Code availability

The codes used for data preparation and analyses are provided in a public repository: https://github.com/legli/AgriculturalStability.

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Acknowledgements

L.E. acknowledges funding from the Helmholtz Association (Research School ESCALATE, VH-KO-613). We thank V. Grimm for discussions; M. Wu for statistical support and D. Renard for discussions and the exchange of code to make our analysis clearer and more consistent. The FAOSTAT database is maintained and regularly updated by FAO with regular support from its Member States.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UFZ - Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

    Lukas Egli, Matthias Schröter & Ralf Seppelt

  2. University of Potsdam, Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, Potsdam, Germany

    Lukas Egli

  3. University of Münster, Institute of Landscape Ecology, Münster, Germany

    Christoph Scherber

  4. Centre for Biodiversity Monitoring, Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn, Germany

    Christoph Scherber

  5. University of Göttingen, Agroecology, Department of Crop Sciences, Göttingen, Germany

    Teja Tscharntke

  6. University of Göttingen, Centre of Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use (CBL), Göttingen, Germany

    Teja Tscharntke

  7. Institute of Geoscience and Geography, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Ralf Seppelt

Authors
  1. Lukas Egli
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  2. Matthias Schröter
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  4. Teja Tscharntke
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  5. Ralf Seppelt
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Contributions

L.E., M.S., T.T. and R.S. designed the study. L.E. and C.S. performed the analysis. All authors wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lukas Egli.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Main determinants of national caloric production stability.

a–h, Effects of crop diversity (a), crop asynchrony (b), irrigation (c), nitrogen use intensity (d), temperature instability (e), precipitation instability (f), warfare (g) and time (h) on caloric production stability. Results are shown for the linear regression models including crop diversity (green), crop asynchrony (blue) and both (orange) (n = 590). Irrigation and nitrogen use intensity were back-transformed from square-root-transformation, predicted values were back-transformed from log-transformation. Predictions were calculated using the observed range of the focal predictor, while keeping all the other predictors at their mean values. Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals. The figure was created with the statistical software package R 3.6.110.

Extended Data Table 1 Data sources underlying the analyses
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Determinants of national caloric production stability
Full size table

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Egli, L., Schröter, M., Scherber, C. et al. Crop asynchrony stabilizes food production. Nature 588, E7–E12 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2965-6

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