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Spatial and temporal trends in agro-climatic limitations to production potentials for grain maize and winter wheat in Switzerland

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Abstract

Climate is a major driver of agricultural production potentials. To make the best use of these potentials, agricultural management should be adjusted to local climatic conditions. As these conditions change over time, understanding climatic limitations and their trends in time and space is essential for the planning of suitable adaptation measures. In this study, we provide a detailed spatio-temporal analysis of climatic yield potentials for grain maize and winter wheat in Switzerland. We find that current climatic suitability for grain maize is mostly limited by sub-optimal temperatures, radiation and water scarcity, while climatic suitability for winter wheat is mostly limited through excess water, insufficient radiation, as well as frost and heat stress. Over the investigated period from 1983 to 2010, few regional trends in climate suitability were identified for the two crops, indicating that grain maize has benefitted slightly from increasing growth temperatures with recent warming (0.5 °C/decade), while winter wheat suitability decreased slightly due to suboptimal radiation/temperature ratios with warming. Despite only small trends in climate suitabilities, which are restricted to particular regions, future climatic changes could lead to more pronounced shifts. The tendencies of climate limitations identified in this study are mostly consistent with findings from other studies, and it can thus be anticipated that maize may continue to benefit from increasing temperatures on the short term, but may also be increasingly limited by water scarcity as summer precipitation decreases. For winter wheat, the relevance of heat stress is likely to increase with increasing temperatures. These results may help to support short-term adaptation planning. However, more detailed analyses of climate projections will be necessary to investigate “critical transitions” and provide more specific information to support long-term climate change adaptation planning (e.g. for irrigation and breeding programmes).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss for providing daily gridded meteorological data used in this study, Andreas Roesch from Agroscope Tänikon for providing the yield data for the data-based refinement of factor suitability functions, Pierluigi Calanca from Agroscope Reckenholz for providing valuable comments on the manuscript and Alice Baux from Agroscope Changins for providing expert information on crop requirements and comments on the manuscript. The work contributes to the National Research Program NCCR Climate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agroscope, Climate and Air Pollution Group, Reckenholzstr. 191, 8046, Zürich, Switzerland

    Annelie Holzkämper & Jürg Fuhrer

  2. Agroscope, Field Crop Breeding Group, Route de Duillier 50, 1260, Nyon, Switzerland

    Dario Fossati

  3. Agroscope, Varieties and Seeds, Reckenholzstr. 191, 8046, Zürich, Switzerland

    Jürg Hiltbrunner

Authors
  1. Annelie Holzkämper
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  2. Dario Fossati
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  3. Jürg Hiltbrunner
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  4. Jürg Fuhrer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Annelie Holzkämper.

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Editor: Wolfgang Cramer.

Appendix

Appendix

Factor suitability functions for winter wheat identified in 50 GA runs (black lines; orange lines show average functions) within the pre-defined knowledge-based bounds (grey areas) [P = precipitation, ET0 = reference evapotranspiration, T min = minimum temperature, T max = maximum temperature, PTQ = photothermal quotient calculated as average daily solar radiation (MJ/m2) divided by average daily mean temperature (°C); Fig. 8].

Fig. 8
figure 8

Factor suitability functions for winter wheat identified in 50 GA runs (black lines; orange lines show average functions) within the predefined knowledge-based bounds (grey areas) (P precipitation, ET 0 reference evapotranspiration, T min minimum temperature, T max maximum temperature, PTQ photothermal quotient calculated as average daily solar radiation [MJ/m2] divided by average daily mean temperature [°C]) (colour figure online)

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Holzkämper, A., Fossati, D., Hiltbrunner, J. et al. Spatial and temporal trends in agro-climatic limitations to production potentials for grain maize and winter wheat in Switzerland. Reg Environ Change 15, 109–122 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-014-0627-7

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