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Impact of climate change on the potential geographical suitability of cassava and sweet potato vs. rice and potato in India

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Abstract

The current study focused on determining the potential geographical suitability of cassava and sweet potato, two major tropical root crops of India, using the species distribution model, MaxEnt and QGIS. The model showed excellent performance based on the AUC (area under the ROC curve) values (> 0.8) obtained during training and testing. District wise geographical suitability is analysed, and the results indicate an increase in the geographical suitability of cassava in the future with a percentage increase of 42, 41; 32, 43; and 33, 32 for 2030, 2050, and 2070, respectively, for the two representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5. The same for sweet potato is 32, 25; 27, 31; and 23, 21, respectively. The geographical suitability of rice and potato is also tested in India in the future to compare the results of cassava and sweet potato. The percentage increase in rice suitability is 17, 15; 15, 17; and 13, 11 for 2030, 2050, and 2070, respectively, for the two RCPs about its current growing locations. The increase in geographical suitability of potato is 10, 11; 10, 9; and 10, 9%, respectively. The outcome of this study shares information about the highly suitable districts for cassava, sweet potato, rice, and potato across the Indian subcontinent in the future. It can assist the decision managers in diversifying crops to highly suitable areas to ensure food security.

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Availability of data and materials

The bioclimatic variables of current and future data are downloaded from Worldclim 2.1 (Fick and Hijmans 2017) and are masked for the Indian subcontinent; further these data are converted into ‘asc’ format for the MaxEnt model using the R and QGIS softwares. The district wise crop presence point data are collected from the report of All India Coordinated Research Project on Tuber Crops (AICRP-TC) of 2017–2018 (George and Sunitha, 2017–2018) and Horticultural Statistics of Govt. of India (Saxena et al. 2018).

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the Women Scientist Scheme, Department of Science & Technology, India (DST WOS-A); ICAR-Central Tuber Crops Research Institute (ICAR-CTCRI), Thiruvananthapuram, India; and All India Coordinated Research Project on Tuber Crops (AICRP-TC) for the complete support to fulfil this study. We are also acknowledging Fick and Hijmans (2017) for the Worldclim 2.1—historic and future climate data. We acknowledge Dr. Govindan Kutty M, Indian Institute of Space Science & Technology, India, for the grammatical modification of the revised text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICAR – Central Tuber Crops Research Institute, Thiruvananthapuram, 695017, Kerala, India

    Pushpalatha Raji, Rajan Shiny & Gangadharan Byju

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  1. Pushpalatha Raji
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  2. Rajan Shiny
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  3. Gangadharan Byju
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Contributions

Dr. Raji Pushpalatha performed the work. Dr. Byju Gangadharan supervised and analysed the results. Ms. Shiny Rajan provided us with the shapefile of India.

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Correspondence to Gangadharan Byju.

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Raji, P., Shiny, R. & Byju, G. Impact of climate change on the potential geographical suitability of cassava and sweet potato vs. rice and potato in India. Theor Appl Climatol 146, 941–960 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03763-1

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