Cultural festival, climate change in different phenological phases, and lychee yield in China

Abstract

As one of the biggest agroproducts producers, China plays an important role in the global supply. Yet, climate change inevitably threatens their production and leads to tremendous losses. Furthermore, climatic and nonclimatic factors are likely to influence their producing behaviors and yields. Accordingly, this work aims to explore both the qualitative and quantitative nexus between climate change, nonclimatic drivers, and agroproduct yield in China. We choose lychee (Litchi chinensis Sonn.), with world's largest production in China and one of the most demanding agroproduct for climatic conditions, as the subject. A two-way fixed-effect Poisson model with robust standard error is developed based on county-level panel data in 39 main producing counties in China along with climatic and cultural festival factors from 2014 to 2019. The main conclusions are as follows: (a) the lychee culture festival, a nonclimatic driver, has negative effect on lychee yield, and this is a novel effect pathway theoretically and we verify it empirically; (b) climate changes in various phenological phases are significantly correlated to lychee yield; precipitation during the exposure phase or flowering phase has negative effect, and minimum temperature during the heading phase has positive effect, which is the first paper in this field; and (c) a new method is developed to analyze nonnegative yield and production, which could also be applied in other industries.

How environmental conditions, phenological periods, and production endowment affect lychee yield

“…Higher minimum temperature can lead to more lychee yield in China, which is consistent with previous findings that rising minimum temperature results in higher lychee yield in China (Yan et al., 2022). In the heterogeneity analysis, the positive effects of minimum temperature on lychee yield are principally in non‐coastal and non‐western counties due to lower minimum temperature, we discuss a possible reason as the existence of an optimal minimum temperature.…”

“…Introducing phenological periods refines the impacts of environmental conditions and provides more detailed insights than the previous studies (Pope et al., 2014; Weymann et al., 2015). In addition, the minimum temperature during flowering and maturing periods has significant and negative effect on lychee, in accordance with the previous research (Mogensen et al., 1997; Sharma et al., 2016; Takashima et al., 2013; Yan et al., 2022).…”

“…The details of the location, geographic coordinates, and sampling sites for lychee production in China are presented by Yan et al. (2022).…”

“…In some research, phenological data was introduced, and they examined the impact of environmental conditions on yield in different phenological periods (Egea et al., 2003; Gourdji et al., 2015; Guo et al., 2015; Luedeling & Gassner, 2012; Pope et al., 2014; Sharma et al., 2016; Weymann et al., 2015; Yan et al., 2022). This kind of analysis is more distinctive and precise since the environmental conditions in different phenological periods may generate different effects on the yield.…”

“…Common data forms to probe the impacts include (1) identical‐frequency time series, such as scenario analysis and planning (Borgomeo et al., 2018; Doelman et al., 2018; Pradhan & Ghosh, 2019), and (2) identical‐frequency panel data (Chalise et al., 2017; Chen & Gong, 2020; Yan et al., 2022). Most econometric models of identical‐frequency time series only covered part of the impact factors (this is determined by the model characteristics).…”