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  • Review Article
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Crop traits and production under drought

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 5, pages 211–225 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Drought limits crop productivity and threatens global food security, with moderate drought stress — when crops grow at a reduced rate — commonly experienced. Increasing plant tolerance to moderate drought is a key target for adaptation and management, but efforts to understand and increase drought tolerance often focus on more extreme drought that causes complete crop failure and only consider crop genetics. In this Review, we discuss the influence of moderate drought on crop productivity and the role of physiological traits in drought tolerance and adaptation. Traits related to crop water use, water capture, water availability, transpiration efficiency and phenology impact drought adaptation, but their overall effect varies situationally. For example, early restrictions in transpiration, higher transpiration efficiency or altered tillering increase water availability during grain filling and can double yield in some drought scenarios. However, these same traits under less severe drought scenarios can also lead to yield penalties. To assess when and under what conditions traits will be beneficial, crop models are used to integrate the effects of genetics, the environment and management, estimating the expected yield responses under these combinations of scenarios and traits. More robust characterization of moderate drought tolerance and better integration between plant genetic information and modelling will enable the local selection of crop varieties suited to the expected drought scenarios.

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Fig. 1: Crop productive response to drought.
Fig. 2: The water-centred view of drought tolerance.
Fig. 3: Physiological traits impacting drought tolerance.
Fig. 4: Key drought response traits with known genes or genetic controls.
Fig. 5: Cumulated transpiration trajectories.
Fig. 6: Crop modelling to characterize the crop environments and assess the value of physiological traits in target environments.

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Acknowledgements

V.V. was supported by the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) ICARUS project (Improve Crops in Arid Regions and future climates) funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) (grant ANR-17-MPGA-0011), by the Occitanie Region through a financial contribution to grant ANR-17-MPGA-0011 and by Montpellier University of Excellence (I-Site MUSE). A.G. acknowledges support from the Agence National de la Recherche (PlastiMil grant ANR-20-CE20-0016). A.H. acknowledges support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation projects ‘Stress tolerant rice for Africa and South Asia’ and ‘PlantDirect - Dry Direct Seeded Rice for the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India’. K.C. acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council (ARC Linkage Project LP210200723) and The University of Queensland. L.L. acknowledges support from the Agence National de la Recherche (SorDrought grant ANR-23-CE20-0052).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR DIADE, IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement), University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France

    Vincent Vadez, Alexandre Grondin & Laurent Laplaze

  2. ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), Patancheru, India

    Vincent Vadez

  3. CERAAS (Centre d’Etudes Régional pour l’Amélioration de l’Adaptation à la Sécheresse), Campus ENSA, Thies, Senegal

    Vincent Vadez

  4. University of Queensland, QAAFI (Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation), Gatton, Queensland, Australia

    Karine Chenu

  5. Rice Breeding Innovations Department, International Rice Research Institute, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines

    Amelia Henry

  6. INRAE (Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement), GAFL, Avignon, France

    Emilie J. Millet

  7. Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Andrea Carminati

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Vadez, V., Grondin, A., Chenu, K. et al. Crop traits and production under drought. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 211–225 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00514-w

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