North–South divide: contrasting impacts of climate change on crop yields in Scotland and England

Abstract

Effects of climate change on productivity of agricultural crops in relation to diseases that attack them are difficult to predict because they are complex and nonlinear. To investigate these crop-disease-climate interactions, UKCIP02 scenarios predicting UK temperature and rainfall under high-and low-CO 2 emission scenarios for the 2020s and 2050s were combined with a crop-simulation model predicting yield of fungicide-treated winter oilseed rape and with a weather-based regression model predicting severity of phoma stem canker epidemics. The combination of climate scenarios and crop model predicted that climate change will increase yield of fungicide-treated oilseed rape crops in Scotland by up to 0.5 t ha 21 (15%). In contrast, in southern England the combination of climate scenarios, crop, disease and yield loss models predicted that climate change will increase yield losses from phoma stem canker epidemics to up to 50 per cent (1.5 t ha 21) and greatly decrease yield of untreated winter oilseed rape. The size of losses is predicted to be greater for winter oilseed rape cultivars that are susceptible than for those that are resistant to the phoma stem canker pathogen Leptosphaeria maculans. Such predictions illustrate the unexpected, contrasting impacts of aspects of climate change on crop-disease interactions in agricultural systems in different regions.

Impacts of climate change on wheat anthesis and fusarium ear blight in the UK

“…The earlier effect of temperature may relate to production of pathogen inoculum, which probably limits epidemics more in the UK than it does in North America, South America and continental Europe where considerably more maize is grown (Paul et al 2007). This work demonstrates that it is only when crop and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 17 disease models are combined that it is possible to project whether severity of epidemics will be increased (Luo et al 1995), as for phoma stem canker on oilseed rape (Evans et al 2008;Butterworth et al 2010), or decreased, as for light leaf spot on oilseed rape in the UK .…”

Simulating future precipitation extremes in a complex Alpine catchment

“…Although weather generators are commonly used to generate long time series of synthetic weather for current climate conditions, they have been increasingly applied in climate impact assessments in recent years (e.g. Semenov, 2007;Butterworth et al, 2010).…”

Linking Plant Disease Models to Climate Change Scenarios to Project Future Risks of Crop Diseases: A Review

“…Because of space limitations, these different effects cannot be shown in detail in Table 1. 4) According to Butterworth et al (2010) strategies for breeding cultivars with improved resistance will need to include trials in countries which today have the climate that the UK is projected to have in the future, since some temperature-dependent genes for resistance to pathogens are ineffective at increased temperatures. Such trials will help to identify resistance that can operate effectively under the projected future UK climate.…”

“…With the knowledge where economically important crop diseases of particular perennial agricultural crops might occur in the future, low risk locations could be identified in order to avoid or minimise the future impact of these diseases (Shabani & Kumar 2013). For annual crops such as oilseed rape, shifting of cultivation zones was one of the suggested adaptations under a worse-case scenario (Table 1, see Butterworth et al 2010). …”