Identifying chickpea homoclimes using the APSIM chickpea model

Abstract

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) has been traditionally grown in India but is a relatively new export crop in Australia where its cultivation is expanding into new areas. The objective of this study was to identify homoclimes (i.e. similar chickpea-growing environments) in the major chickpea-growing areas of the 2 countries, using the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) chickpea model. The model, which processes climatic, soil, and plant information on a daily time step, was first validated and then used to simulate flowering, maturity, and grain yield of Amethyst, a mid-season cultivar, and Barwon, a full-season cultivar, on low (100 mm), medium (150 mm), and high (190 mm) water-holding capacity soils, using historical climatic data of 67 Australian and 24 Indian locations. The mean of annual outputs of flowering, maturity, and grain yield of the 2 cultivars on 3 soils was then clustered using Ward’s hierarchical complete linkage clustering procedure. At a 90% level of similarity, all the locations could be grouped into 6 homoclime clusters. The Australian locations appeared more diverse as they were present in all the clusters, whereas the Indian locations were present only in clusters 1, 2, and 6. While there were clear geographical patterns of spread of these clusters, in Australia they were not entirely related to latitude. The cluster 1 and 2 locations, which represent the largest chickpea-growing area in Australia, had homoclime locations in common with northern India. The clustering of locations appeared generally consistent with the known adaptation of chickpea in different environments of the 2 countries and therefore suggests that the methodology could be potentially used for complementing conventional approaches of introducing or exchanging germplasm, as well as determining appropriateness of breeding/testing sites.

Modelling the effect of plant water use traits on yield and stay-green expression in sorghum

“…Environment types ranged from very severe (an average grain yield of~100 kg ha -1 ) to no stress conditions (an average grain yield of~1500 kg ha -1 ) and divided the rabi sorghum tract into four zones with similar environmental conditions (Kholová et al 2013). This follows similar efforts in sorghum in Australia ( (Chapman et al 2000a(Chapman et al , 2000b(Chapman et al , 2000c, wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) (Chenu et al 2011(Chenu et al , 2013, maize (Zea mays L.) (Chauhan et al 2013) or chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) (Chauhan et al 2008)). For the rabi sorghum region, which is the object of the current study, we also found that for the recommended management practices, the crop suffered severe water limitations causing substantial yield losses (typically more than half of the yield is lost during severe droughts) in around one-third of the seasons in the core production zone.…”

Can the development of drought tolerant ideotype sustain Australian chickpea yield?

“…These data are comparable to Carberry (1996) and Robertson et al (2002) who each reported a coefficient of determination of 0.7 for days to flowering and yield in chickpea, respectively. Chauhan et al (2008) identified six chickpea growing clusters in Australia and three in India. This diversity reflects the importance of yield stability for both plant breeders and grain growers.…”

Large‐scale characterization of drought pattern: a continent‐wide modelling approach applied to the Australian wheatbelt – spatial and temporal trends

“…Finally, (4) environment characterization can be used to identify similar growing environments around the world and exchange germplasm accordingly or breed for germplasm adapted to some world-wide ET (e.g. Braun et al, 1996;Chauhan et al, 2008;Hernandez-Segundo et al, 2009;Mathews et al, 2011).…”